First of all, apologies for a rather long hiatus here - some nine months take or leave a few weeks, as I remember. Life with a new life to take care of can get busy, and I'm only now returning to some of the activities I used to do regularly in the pre-baby world - e.g. reading your thoughts.
I hope you don't mind me putting it that way, but a lot of your thinking sounds as if it's coming from a, er, more experienced me, shall we say. The concept of "home" and its once granitic qualities were shot to shards for me years ago, and I have come to long belonging to a land (as opposed to the other way round) in the last few years. But no real solution as to how to achieve that has materialised for me as of yet, especially since the local culture of the UK doesn't really support the few ways I know how to. I wonder how long it will take me to start belonging to a land again.
Hello again - it's nice to see you back (and congratulations on that new little life you've brought into being!).
Your thought is interesting to me, because it speaks to my sense of what is perhaps lost when we become a 'citizen of the world'. I see myself less as that by the day, even though home to me is still a foreign land. Perhaps it's an age thing (as you very politely avoided saying quite so explicitly).
It may also be about approaching a time when where you are is likely to be where you will rest, disintegrating into nothing, for eternity. My place is right for such an ending (though I hope to squeeze a couple more decades or so of worthwhile living in first).
It's nice to be back - thanks for the congrats! From my point of view, the whole "citizen of the world" thing is a non thing beyond the age of 25. Humans need to feel connected, need to have people and places that matter to them. In one's youth it's easy to pop a rucksack on one's shoulder and believe, truly believe, that it's possible to fly from flower to flower for the rest of our days and that we won't be worse off for it. Then the vast majority of people one day wake up to realize they bought living quarters in a place that has no actual meaning for them other than it was cheap enough, good enough, and close enough to work; that their friends are elsewhere experiencing similar thoughts and patterns of behaviour; that they could run around the town where they were born twice over and maybe spot a known face; that they could run around the town where they currently live twice over and maybe spot a known face. I wish the place where I live had traditions I could participate in - it would be a relief to know that there's community living I can actually engage in, but that's not the case. Instead, I am slowly building a community within the community, gambling on people unlikely to leave, at the very least in the short to medium term. It's hard - the culture and lifestyle don't support my endeavour. To be clear, I don't long for some kind of bucolic paradise and herds of any kind are really not my thing - I wouldn't move to the place you describe because it's not "me", regardless of its clearly rather strong roots in the land and community spirit. But that a place needed to be "me" and that I needed to be "of the place" is big news for my younger self, and a source of real struggle for my current incarnation. When I said you sound like a more "experienced me" much as the expression was a tongue-in-cheek reference to age, I actually said so with genuine relief at the thought that it's possible, with enough commitment and self development, to make a foreign land into home, and be a home onto oneself. It might just be a matter of time and patience, I suppose.
I think you might enjoy the writing of Paul Kingsnorth at this point. He talks of home somewhat more poetically and cleverly than me. But his thought strands are essentially similar...
'The liberal view of nature sees people as deracinated individuals, able to move around the world like pieces on a chess board. Every square is identical and the pieces never change in relation to where they are. We can shuffle about following money or work or ambition or pleasure and we will remain the same people as we do so. But people aren’t like this. Places change us, and we change them. Everything is in relationship. Our left hemisphere world has long forgotten this.'
(By 'left hemisphere' Paul refers to the brain. See the neuroscience work of Ian McGilchrist. ChatGPT will summarise it reasonably well, if you don't feel like reading his original texts. I'm currently obsessed with this, because it seems to account for a lot of things I've noticed and wondered about.)
Interesting - I'll give it a read, thanks! Feels a tad funny to be encouraged to read a book based on it saying essentially what I'm saying, come to think of it :) I do it too with others - but I've only just realised that there's something weird about it. Maybe the attractiveness of it is in the detail I might not have thought about, rather than the main point being the same? I'll let you know when I get round to it, but thanks for the validation, I guess!
Paying for subscription to support your ‘being’ not just your writing. It’s your ability to be that comes through in your writing for me. Less is more for me theses days.
First of all, apologies for a rather long hiatus here - some nine months take or leave a few weeks, as I remember. Life with a new life to take care of can get busy, and I'm only now returning to some of the activities I used to do regularly in the pre-baby world - e.g. reading your thoughts.
I hope you don't mind me putting it that way, but a lot of your thinking sounds as if it's coming from a, er, more experienced me, shall we say. The concept of "home" and its once granitic qualities were shot to shards for me years ago, and I have come to long belonging to a land (as opposed to the other way round) in the last few years. But no real solution as to how to achieve that has materialised for me as of yet, especially since the local culture of the UK doesn't really support the few ways I know how to. I wonder how long it will take me to start belonging to a land again.
Hello again - it's nice to see you back (and congratulations on that new little life you've brought into being!).
Your thought is interesting to me, because it speaks to my sense of what is perhaps lost when we become a 'citizen of the world'. I see myself less as that by the day, even though home to me is still a foreign land. Perhaps it's an age thing (as you very politely avoided saying quite so explicitly).
It may also be about approaching a time when where you are is likely to be where you will rest, disintegrating into nothing, for eternity. My place is right for such an ending (though I hope to squeeze a couple more decades or so of worthwhile living in first).
It's nice to be back - thanks for the congrats! From my point of view, the whole "citizen of the world" thing is a non thing beyond the age of 25. Humans need to feel connected, need to have people and places that matter to them. In one's youth it's easy to pop a rucksack on one's shoulder and believe, truly believe, that it's possible to fly from flower to flower for the rest of our days and that we won't be worse off for it. Then the vast majority of people one day wake up to realize they bought living quarters in a place that has no actual meaning for them other than it was cheap enough, good enough, and close enough to work; that their friends are elsewhere experiencing similar thoughts and patterns of behaviour; that they could run around the town where they were born twice over and maybe spot a known face; that they could run around the town where they currently live twice over and maybe spot a known face. I wish the place where I live had traditions I could participate in - it would be a relief to know that there's community living I can actually engage in, but that's not the case. Instead, I am slowly building a community within the community, gambling on people unlikely to leave, at the very least in the short to medium term. It's hard - the culture and lifestyle don't support my endeavour. To be clear, I don't long for some kind of bucolic paradise and herds of any kind are really not my thing - I wouldn't move to the place you describe because it's not "me", regardless of its clearly rather strong roots in the land and community spirit. But that a place needed to be "me" and that I needed to be "of the place" is big news for my younger self, and a source of real struggle for my current incarnation. When I said you sound like a more "experienced me" much as the expression was a tongue-in-cheek reference to age, I actually said so with genuine relief at the thought that it's possible, with enough commitment and self development, to make a foreign land into home, and be a home onto oneself. It might just be a matter of time and patience, I suppose.
I think you might enjoy the writing of Paul Kingsnorth at this point. He talks of home somewhat more poetically and cleverly than me. But his thought strands are essentially similar...
'The liberal view of nature sees people as deracinated individuals, able to move around the world like pieces on a chess board. Every square is identical and the pieces never change in relation to where they are. We can shuffle about following money or work or ambition or pleasure and we will remain the same people as we do so. But people aren’t like this. Places change us, and we change them. Everything is in relationship. Our left hemisphere world has long forgotten this.'
(By 'left hemisphere' Paul refers to the brain. See the neuroscience work of Ian McGilchrist. ChatGPT will summarise it reasonably well, if you don't feel like reading his original texts. I'm currently obsessed with this, because it seems to account for a lot of things I've noticed and wondered about.)
Interesting - I'll give it a read, thanks! Feels a tad funny to be encouraged to read a book based on it saying essentially what I'm saying, come to think of it :) I do it too with others - but I've only just realised that there's something weird about it. Maybe the attractiveness of it is in the detail I might not have thought about, rather than the main point being the same? I'll let you know when I get round to it, but thanks for the validation, I guess!
Paying for subscription to support your ‘being’ not just your writing. It’s your ability to be that comes through in your writing for me. Less is more for me theses days.
Thanks, Sophie - I appreciate your support and love the sentiment with which it's offered.