A sense of place
[This is an experiment to see if we can foster conversations on this blog. Jane Coleman proposed a topic and Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson and I each promised to give it a paragraph or two, and then I would put it together and post it. It is our hope that others will feel inclined to add comments via Reply or, if that doesn’t work, by emailing me so that I can post on their behalf.
[Hint: Write your remarks in a word program first, and save them. Then if they get lost in the process of trying to post them, you only have to pull up the saved file and copy it to me to do for you.]
From Jane Coleman:
I was thinking about the year I went to Yosemite National Park and went hiking for several days. I noticed that my memory had a certain feeling about it, something unique. It had its own signature and resonance and mood. I could call it a signature, and yet it encompasses all these things.
As I considered that event, I also recognized that all the places I’ve ever been have a certain signature about them. They each feel a certain way. The memories have colored them. I would equate that to the way I recognize my friends. Each has a unique feeling about them, their unique signature, some something that I would recognize no matter where.
Your thoughts?
From Christine Sampson:
Ok. Here’s what I got.
Carnival! The joy! The excitement ! The things to do, to observe, to participate in, to ignore, to discover! My life in retrospect. The faces, the places, the actions, the inactions, the dismissing, the accepting, the relishing. Each individual act, moment, created and placed by forces beyond the conscious mind, to allow exploration and growth and knowing and wonder.
I sit in the warm sunshine feeling very feline. Thankful. In gratitude.
A cacophony of all visible and invisible, to be sussed out and savored in a flash or at leisure.
From Jane Peranteau:
After sitting with it:
Our response to experience leaves emotional trace elements, like snail trails, in the mind. Pathways that create scaffoldings of self-knowing.
Are these the same as filters?
Yes. Because pathways change what we allow in and what we don’t. They change us in terms of our choices. You can have a pathways series that builds a filter or serves an openness.
The feeling you have for a person or a place determines an openness to them or a caution or a closed-ness. Succeeding experiences can change that–e.g., as we forgive or are forgiven, receive insights and revelations, or continue to be enhanced by further experience.
Feeling is always informed by everything we know, which is everything we are. It is not experienced separate from reason or science (e.g., science can track feeling’s movement through the body and mind) or knowledge.
Would it be fair to say that the signature each of those places and people have is your love for them? The uniqueness of signature recognizes how love is not a blind blanket emotion but fits the characteristics and traits of who is loving and what is loved.
[Good question, Jane C. A big question. It incited a trail of sudden awarenesses that led to insights along the way, each having the potential to be its own pathway. Frank, I see what we’re doing as another extension of what intending ILC makes possible.]
From Frank DeMarco:
It has always struck me how different places have a different “feel” that is more than mere aesthetics. When I was a boy, the fields of my father’s farm were quite different from city streets, say, or someone’s lawn. The woods that were behind our house and across the street had a special feel that I loved. My life had trees well before it had books! And places devoted to a consistent endeavor seem to me to acquire their own signature, as well:
• Churches, or any place where many people have prayed over many years
• Libraries, suffused with the auras of readers and, it seems, writer
• The grounds at The Monroe Institute, specifically, where for more than 40 years people have come to explore their unknown potential.
And these are just “ordinary” places! We haven’t even touched on what are called sacred sites.