Genius loci: A sense of place, to go

Boston Globe

a day ago

In earlier days, if I was on the phone I would be at my desk or the kitchen table. Now, by default, I often find myself in conversation when I am away from home and, often, outdoors. That shift in habit has made me aware of how place can be braided into human exchange. I remember a conversation I had with my son when he was just out of college and considering those ways in which his life was changing. A move to the West Coast? I had pulled over at a rest area that offered a view to the distant Catskills, among the oldest mountains in America. Stay or move? Come or go? The conversation around these variables, what is permanent and what is temporary, was framed by the silhouette of the ancient ridges and peaks. Both the place and the words have stayed in my mind.
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These incidental alignments of place and talk can enrich both. Sometimes I grab my phone before I take my morning walk. There was the morning after a heavy rainstorm, with branches downed, a creek bed flooded, but the fields and woodlands still glistening with the shine of rain. When the phone buzzed, it was a friend who had just started a second round of chemo. It was fatigue more than nausea that was knocking her over now, but it alternated with fear, nerve, humor. When I think of that conversation now, I know that the wild beauty of the suddenly disturbed earth was a full presence in the exchange.
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Of course, not every conversation is momentous. The day to dayness of an ordinary chat with a neighbor was sometimes expanded as I drove up New York Route 22 in the early morning for a weekly teaching job in Vermont. I would catch up with news of the day — a bear at the bird feeder, a change in zoning proposed at the town board meeting — as the road unspooled behind me, the cornfields, the forests, and farms all seeming to ground the conversation in some larger sphere of rural life.
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And more than once I have talked through something I am trying to write with an editor while walking along a streamside path in a park near our house. I know now why I do this: There is something in the energy, the continuity, the momentum of the flowing water that coincides with the way I am trying to think through the ideas. Water finds its way, and I am hoping to do the same.
These landscapes are not just a backdrop for conversation; rather, they are full participants. It could be the afternoon light, the patterning of leaves, the sequined surface of water, a distant ridgeline, but as these become interwoven into human exchange, they also situate us in a profound way in a greater world. In doing so, they become a part of how we absorb ideas and experience. Places seep into us in different ways. The view to the Catskills always reminds me now of that conversation with my son and his decision to stay. But such are the unexpected associations and reciprocities offered us when we recognize that powerful partnership between the words we use and the places we inhabit.
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