“Place and a thoughts might interpenetrate until the character of each is altered,” the good Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote as she mirrored on the relationship between nature and human nature. However what we name place — that unalloyed presence with a right here and now, with the unfolding of time in a locus of house — penetrates greater than the thoughts: it permeates physique and spirit and the complete constellation of being. There’s a purpose why the unique Latin use of the phrase genius was within the phrase genius loci — the spirit of a spot. We become who we are in the crucible of where we are.
Our minds, nonetheless, are born wanderers — perpetual refugees from presence, perpetually paying for his or her flight with loneliness. We go on forgetting that we’re not solely embodied creatures, however embodied within the physique of the world; we go on forgetting that the right here and now — that locus of intimacy with all the pieces and everybody else inhabiting this island of spacetime, intimacy with the pulsating totality of our personal being — is our solely refuge from the existential loneliness that’s the worth of being alive.
That’s what Barry Lopez (January 6, 1945–December 25, 2020) explores in “Invitation” — one of many twenty-six beautiful essays in his posthumous assortment Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (public library).
Drawing on his longtime immersion in indigenous cultures and his lifelong journey with native companions, Lopez counters the hole stereotype that indigenous folks’s connection to put is a kind of “primitive” sensitivity to be contrasted with “superior” civilization:
Such a dismissive view, as I’ve come to know it, ignores the good intangible worth that reaching bodily intimacy with a spot may present. I’m inclined to level out to somebody who condescends to such a want for intimacy, though it may appear impolite, that it’s not doable for human beings to outgrow loneliness. Nor can somebody from a tradition that condescends to nature simply escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless.
Existential loneliness and a way that one’s life is inconsequential, each of that are hallmarks of contemporary civilizations, appear to me to derive partly from our abandoning a perception within the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A frequently refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns within the pure world, patterns which are ever current and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the sensation that one is alone on the planet, or meaningless in it. The trouble to know a spot deeply is, in the end, an expression of the human want to belong, to suit someplace.
This longing to belong with the world is the fulcrum of our craving for that means. Whitman knew it when, after his paralytic stroke, he arrived at what makes life worth living; Mary Shelley knew it when, within the wake of her staggering bereavement, she reckoned with what gives meaning to a broken life; Lopez is aware of it, finding the treatment for our existential loneliness in our intimate relationship to put:
The dedication to know a specific place, in my expertise, is persistently rewarded. And each pure place, to my thoughts, is open to being identified. And someplace on this course of an individual begins to sense that they themselves have gotten identified, in order that when they’re absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be identified, reinforces a way that one is important on the planet.
This query of how our relationship to put deepens our relationship to life permeates the complete ebook. In one other essay from it, titled “An Intimate Geography,” he writes:
Intimacy with the bodily Earth apparently awakens in us, at some wordless stage, a primal information of the character of our emotional in addition to our organic attachments to bodily landscapes. Based mostly alone inquiries, my impression is that we expertise this primal connection recurrently as a diffuse, ineffable pleasure, expertise it because the easing of a specific sort of longing.
Lopez is the final word fashionable anti-Cartesian, reminding us time and again of our creaturely nature, interconnected and indivisible — the lifetime of the thoughts indivisible from the lifetime of the physique, our transportable totalities interleaved with the entire of the world. He affords a succinct prescription for remedying the fundamental longing pulsating beneath our restlessness and our loneliness:
Maybe the primary rule of all the pieces we endeavor to do is to concentrate. Maybe the second is to be affected person. And maybe a 3rd is to be attentive to what the physique is aware of.
Complement these fragments from the wholly magnificent Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World with C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing and this beautiful illustrated antidote to our elemental loneliness, then revisit Lopez on the key to great storytelling and the three steps to becoming a writer.
