A Sense of Place

View the video recording at the end of this post for a read of this post and pics of the places I mention as part of my presentation for the launch of our weekly Wild Recovery gathering.

I’ve heard it said that longing is sacred.

A year ago while living in Portland, I attended a workshop on intergenerational trauma. I was surrounded by strangers, leaning back onto seven women, each leaning back on the one behind them like nesting dolls. They were each place-holders for the matriarchal line of my family: seven generations of women back to the first one who left Ireland during the potato famine to brave a new world. Each of those women passed down a different aspect of that loss – withdrawal, anger, anxiety – and each daughter developed a different reaction to how she was mothered. At the end of the line, I have inherited them all. And my body has inherited the longing for a sense of home, without knowing exactly where that is. I just know it’s not here.

One of the assistants at the workshop had just moved to the Pacific Northwest from her home in Cape Cod. And when it was her turn to be at the center, she just lay and wept, her heart spilling over for the wild coastal marshes she had left behind. I thought of the landscape that had inspired Mary Oliver. I thought of how much I envied having such a deep connection to a place. I wondered if I would be able to risk the pain of missing it. After seven generations, the trauma of separation felt frozen in my chest.

It wasn’t long before I found myself making more and more frequent visits to a small, private college campus a short walk from my apartment in southeast Portland. I had recently left my marriage of 10 years and was feeling the relief and disorientation of being 35, single, and childless, with a new and uncertain career. What drew me to this campus was a river that ran right through the center of it, and that had been restored to its flourishing wild state and was being lovingly, and covertly, maintained. For the first year, I lingered on the bridge overlooking the river and the trees at the bend beyond. Then in the Fall, just as it was getting too cold to explore outdoors, I ventured down to the path along the water’s edge.

The next spring, I began visiting several times a week. I watched the pale yellow tips of the skunk cabbage push up through the thawing mud, the ducks courting and nesting, the blossoming trees popping. Summer came, there were heron stalking in the marshes, mounds of lush foliage and side pools with hiding places. One day I came face to face with a barred owl. And one afternoon as Fall approached, I spied three river otter tumbling the shallows. This place captured my imagination, as I pictured myself three inches tall living on a tiny island and rowing a leaf boat to gather berries.

At the center of this place was a baby alder tree standing alone on the shoulder of a bend in the path. I had been mothered by a stout alder tree in the middle of my backyard growing up in a suburb of LA, and I’d always felt an affinity for them. I was frightened for this young one. I was certain some insensitive passerby would damage it. Or that the winter would take it. One summer it lost most of its leaves to something with tiny jaws and an insatiable appetite. But in whatever condition I found it, in whatever season I visited, I would take its slender trunk between my thumb and forefinger, and bend close to kiss the place where it’s first limbs branched from the center stalk. I would whisper words of encouragement and gratitude. At time, my eyes would well.

This place made me feel strong. It not only tolerated, but invited, all the parts of me. It allowed my grief to decompose. It sent my vision soaring and made my most intimate dreams feel possible. I followed the dreams of that river and its marshy banks away from my career and my home, out into the world seeking purer expressions of poetry and wilderness. I found myself in an intentional spiritual community in the middle of rolling farmland 30-mintues outside Portland. Despite meditation and service, and greenery all around, I felt starved. No one supported the depths I wanted to explore. And while surrounded by plants, the hills felt thin, exploited and quietly suffocating. I searched endlessly for a wild place that felt alive and only found toxic tangles of blackberry and spindly monoculture wheat stalks.

In bed one night drifting to sleep, the image of that river marsh rose startlingly full and lush in my mind. I resisted, afraid of being overwhelmed by hopeless longing and despair, but I let the tears come and with them, the realization of where I was truly loved. On my next day off, I drove a half day to visit my old marsh – afraid of what I might find, or not find.

Around the bend in the path, I saw that baby alder. A bit thicker, covered with wide, bright lush leaves, and practically shimmering. As I approached, the tenderness rose up from my belly and spilled over. I took the trunk between my fingers and leaned in, and was flooded by the realization that this was my family; the Alders were my family. I hadn’t changed my name after my divorce, but the next week, I filed a petition to legally become an Alder.

I haven’t been back to the marsh since that day. I came to Northern California for an apprenticeship in ecopsychology and wilderness rites of passage. I began backpacking alone and sleeping out under the oak scrub, but my body gave up in protest of so much fruitless wandering. Within a year I was diagnosed with three auto-immune disorders and withdrew from the strenuous exercise, processed camp food, and risk of tick bites. The oak savannah hills and reeling raptors, billowing sea mists and tule marshes are beautiful, but this isn’t my home. I dream of the lush and mossy, foggy and moody northwest. But I know now that it takes more than love of the land to build a home.

My new trauma therapist tells me that longing is sacred – it shows us what our soul loves most dearly and the direction of our meaning. She tells me that in addition to learning to fully inhabit my body, I should learn to keep the Alders with me, always. My heart groans and turns over at the memory of the pain of losing them, but softens a bit with the idea of what it might feel like to belong, internally, where ever I go.

In this time of solitude and withdrawal, I am relearning how to love the soil of my body, to tend it and trust it. I am allowing myself to begin to accept that perhaps this wandering is a generational restlessness in my body, some sort of karmic consequence of all my ancestors have abandoned and desecrated in the name of a better life. Perhaps the solution is to stop searching and belong here, now, to recognize that I am, in fact, not alone, even when physically separated from the wild places I have loved and dream to find. This beautiful marsh and this growing alder are still there inside me to help me heal what my ancestors could not. They invite me to allow what I’ve carried for lifetimes to decompose, to allow the nourishment I need to seep in.

I dream sometimes of returning in a decade or two and wrapping my arms around that tree. But I know that after all these years, the reality of that marsh isn’t what it is in my mind. That place I grew to know from three years of visiting, observing, listening, and praising, has transcended the physical realm into something mythological. It is now an enchanted place that holds my body, my dreams, my longings, a place where all the Others I encountered there can continue to speak to me. It makes me wonder if all places, if all things, we let into our hearts become multi-dimensional, become a part of us at every level, a place for not just our bodies, but our minds, hearts, and souls to visit.

Nancy

I invite you to take a moment to think about a wild place you’ve connected with. Close your eyes and go there with all your senses. Let it become not just a memory, but an engaging, interactive landscape inviting you to connect. Know that if you visit regularly, even in your mind, your relationship with this place and everything that lives there will continue to evolve as long as you listen, observe, and praise.

As we transition into group sharing, I invite you to share about a place you’ve connected with or long to find. How has that relationship changed you or would you imagine it changing you. How would having an imaginal relationship with it impact you? What does it reveal to you about who you are and your purpose? What does it ask of you?