*with a nod to David James Duncan, whose book My Story As Told By Water is highly recommended to anyone who is also convinced that "I" and the natural elements are not easily separable.
On a mid-March afternoon, I sit on the south steps of a small cabin attached to a yurt. Bathed in dappled sunlight, I am looking out over Lost Valley Educational Center's tree-ringed meadow, where countless camas bulbs, dormant below the surface over winter, are now readying themselves for bloom. The violet-green swallows returned just yesterday, and spent this morning scouting out nesting spots. A greater variety of bird song greets us almost every day this time of year--a nuthatch is calling right now--and one by one the spring wildflowers also show themselves: spring beauty, trillium, violet, coltsfoot, chickweed, cress.... From where I sit at the moment I can watch bees, spiders, several species of beetle, and various small unidentified insects making their rounds. The clear blue skies, the fresh air, the gentle breezes, and lengthening days of sunshine are enough to make one forget that the rains are likely to return, many times, before summer. I feel peace, openness, possibility, new life, and growth already starting all around me, and preparing to burst forth even more abundantly as winter continues to recede.
In my first draft of this essay all of the "I's" in that initial paragraph were surrounded by quotation marks--but I have removed that punctuation as needless clutter and distraction. However, my reasons for qualifying the term "I"--for emphasizing its "(or so we call it)" nature--are still valid:
1. I have started to suspect that, to paraphrase John Lennon (who said "God" instead of "I", referring to the other side of the same equation), "'I' is a concept by which we measure our pain." "I" implies separation, duality (I and everything-but-I), which is not what I feel at the moment, sitting here on the edge of this meadow.
2. Perhaps more directly to the point in terms of this essay, "I" cannot be divorced from the land on which that "I" is participating in life. "I" is not a wholly independent, easily transposable, separate being, but an outgrowth of the place in which "I" is enmeshed.
This all might sound like some great abstract theory, but it's merely an attempt to articulate something that runs through my experience much deeper than any concept. I have never been able wholly to separate myself--my thoughts, feelings, perceptions, emotions, and general sense of well-being--from the place in which I am dwelling. Each environment has an energy which becomes part of my energy. Each landscape has messages, wisdom, and moods that it seems to impart--and not only to me, but to others who open themselves to it.
How much has the land shaped who I am? As western-socialized humans, we tell ourselves many stories about our unique identities. When we attribute aspects of our character to "nurture" (implying acquired qualities) rather than "nature" (innate qualities), we are usually thinking about the influence of our families and social environments, not of our natural surroundings. But is it possible that the land--meaning the entire ecosystem in which we are embedded--is the single most powerful force in shaping who we are and how we experience the world? Even those qualities that we appear to absorb from or develop as a result of our interactions with other people may, on a more fundamental level, be the land expressing itself through larger social units, through our predecessors and fellow dwellers in whatever place we are calling home.
Instead of telling you who I am by referring to my specific interests, activities, accomplishments, failures (the individualistic "ego" perspective) or by referring to the people who've been important in my life (the social, but still anthropocentric perspective), it would be interesting to talk about my life as an expression of the places I have lived. I will not deny that I feel a sense of self that transcends any particular situation I may find myself in, and that this "I that is uniquely I" is continuous for as long as I can remember--nor will I deny that my family and certain individuals and social groups have been integral in shaping who I am. Those things are undeniably true, and I am glad for that. But it seems equally true--although we have not been trained to perceive this--that because we are embedded in places and ecosystems, all of our individual and social expressions are, inevitably, also outgrowths of those larger systems.
So, as an example, I'll try telling this new kind of life story here, as concisely as I can manage (since my editor is serious about word counts). I have lived almost three-quarters of my life in just three places, where I've spent five-plus to eighteen years apiece, and have spent the rest of my life in places I stayed for anywhere from a day to two years. I'll call those three longer-term homes my "primary home landscapes," and the other significant places I stopped on this journey as "secondary landscapes of influence." And in case that sounds too humorless and academic, I'll substitute the terms "Stomping Grounds" (for the longer-term places) and "Stopping Grounds" (for the others) whenever the mood strikes me.
I moved into the house that became the center of Stomping Grounds #1 when I was less than two years old. I still remember my first visit, when my parents were house-hunting--and my memory is of the basement, which would become the location of many ping-pong games, various construction projects (from a never-to-be launched wooden raft to a robot made primarily from an art easel and a baby powder dispenser), and frequent leaks and in-seeping of water from the surrounding hillside. The basement was also the pre-existing, semi-indoor equivalent of something that I and my playmates in the neighborhood constantly strove for--digging into the earth, making forts, tunneling through bushes, contacting (and occasionally being overwhelmed by) the natural elements and weather extremes.
My house sat several houses down from the top of a hill in a fairly densely populated New York suburb--a place which, seen from above, probably looked much more like what it actually was: a fairly mature mixed deciduous woodland, punctuated by meadows and waterways. Streets, houses, and manicured lawns were prevalent, but they were hardly the dominant elements of my experience of that ecosystem. Instead, I grew up among many large, old trees, in a landscape peppered here and there with apparently immovable glacial erratics and other geological features that even modern civilization had not been able to remove. Creeks and rivers still flowed (occasionally underground, but usually in plain sight), and large fields ringed by trees provided ample area for growing children to play ball or frisbee, fly kites, and run around.
Although our lifestyle could hardly be described as "back to the land" (utilities provided our heat and electricity, we bought all of our groceries, and playhouses were the largest things we ever built), we did experience the four seasons in nearly their full force. Deep snows would cause school cancellations in winter, and allow the construction of snow castles, tunnels, and caves; withering heat and humidity in mid-summer, often culminating in thunderstorms, would have us spending days trying to cool ourselves with lemonade and with dips in the municipal swimming pool, and nights sleeping without bedcovers, serenaded by cicadas. Spring was, to quote e.e. cummings, "mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful," bursting with color after the gray and white winter, and fall was equally colorful as the leaves changed, days shortened, and cool weather returned. Each season was distinctly its own, erasing all memories (at least for a child) of what had come before and what would inevitably come afterward. It was a great environment in which to live in the present--to be a child--to wonder at the nature that was still quite intact around us.
Growing up in Stomping Grounds #1, I experienced these primary feelings: security, familiarity, the relaxed wisdom of a mature ecological landscape, peacefulness, and the exhilaration provided by changes in the weather and the opportunity to play outside no matter what the season (whether sledding down our hill in winter, playing ball during the long days of spring and summer, or burying ourselves in leaves in the fall). In many ways, I knew my home town better than I'll ever know any place again. I knew the nooks and crannies of the landscape from a child's point of view, had access to many more back yards and secret passageways through dense vegetation than most adults will ever have, and most of all, I had time to play, to explore. I did not deliberately avoid streets or houses--that would have been impossible. Instead, I explored my surroundings without judgment, open to the environment in ways that helped me see the life, the opportunities for fun (look, there's a roof to bounce a ball off of) everywhere around me.
I was also surrounded by one of the densest and most diverse populations of squirrels in the world, many of whom were my close neighbors, inhabiting the tree trunks and limbs, telephone wires, and porch rooftop outside of my second-story bedroom window. Our century-old house seemed to be an open invitation to their scampering, and gave me a living space at a level mid-way up several large trees in our yard.
As I grew up, and as my time was gradually taken over more and more by schoolwork, I still wanted to maintain my connection to place. I joined the cross-country and track teams, which meant that, when weather allowed, I spent most of my afternoons running around outside. I had no interest in getting a car; instead, I bicycled to school every day. When I felt increasingly distant from the childhood spirit of play, I still received emotional sustenance from the land. Just as special locations on the land had drawn me to them as a child, I developed intimate connections with various running trails and bicycle routes in my teenage years. I had never truly known myself as separate from this place. Although my parents, brother, and I traveled perhaps six weeks out of every year (most often to what became our "home-away-from-home," a friend's house in New Hampshire's White Mountains)--my home in New York was the place that I always came back to. It was part of me, and I was part of it.
I believe my experience of childhood would have been wholly different had I grown up in a more recently developed suburb, where the landscape had been scraped clean to make way for houses. I grew up in a place with history--a history that respected the land, that wasn't driven by a desire to conquer it and change it in order to make a quick profit. When I talk with people who grew up in more modern tract developments, surrounded by strip malls, they express none of the deep connection to place that was my daily experience as a child. The groundedness that I experienced in the people around me was also in part, I believe, an outgrowth of the place. My companions in those years, like me, spent very little time driving, commuting, or shopping. Most of the time, my schoolmates and even my parents went wherever we were going (which wasn't usually far) on foot or by bicycle.
Leaving that home landscape was perhaps the most difficult transition I've ever made in my life. I was simply unfamiliar with myself apart from that place. The peace and security, the familiarity, the knowing that "everything is right with the world," the love of place and the opportunities for exhilaration that I'd taken for granted for so long--a result of being embedded in that place--suddenly disappeared. I became hopelessly nostalgic for "lost youth" and for the childhood home that changed irrevocably when my social circle disbursed. Each time I returned during a break from college, I noticed that even the place itself was becoming busier, less relaxed: houses sprang up on formerly open land; traffic increased; and fewer children could be seen playing in the neighborhood. I received many signals that in the modern era, even if you try, "you can't go home again"--not to the same feeling of home and connection you knew as a child. Both the place and I had changed.
After living my first eighteen years in this same town, I proceeded to move from location to location for a decade-and-a-half thereafter, never exceeding two continuous years in any one home until I was thirty-four. Each of my Stopping Grounds along the way helped shape my identity in those years: the dark Pennsylvania woods, hemmed in by too many poorly-maintained freeways (of asphalt and of human spirit); the expansive, geologically rich, apparently timeless northern Arizona desert, where land and people seem to share the same native wisdom; the remote, gently rolling hills of northeast Missouri, where time stands still in its own way, and where (if one doesn't read the headlines) things can seem to a native New Yorker a little too comfortable and self-contained; the artificial flatlands of over-cultivated, chemicalized farm country surrounding an organic farm oasis, where the "modern crisis" is as evident in its own way as it is in any city; and many others, each of which could comprise an essay of its own (but I'll resist for now).
Early on in this journey, two years spent on a traveling environmental school affected me profoundly, as my busmates and I experienced firsthand both the wildness of this continent and the destruction caused by our civilization's ways of living on it. Had I been able to insulate my identity from the land's influence, I might not have experienced such a powerful mixture of, on the one hand, land-identification, a melding-with-everything--and on the other hand, extreme disaffection and alienation at the way in which we humans had set ourselves apart so as to destroy fundamental elements of nature both within and without. I decided to seek out ways of living, places, and people involved in finding a different way. I wanted to explore, both on my own and together with other people, how we can bring ourselves back into harmony with the natural world, with one another, and with our essential selves.
The "secondary landscapes of influence" I experienced over the course of many years all drew me in, and each, in its own way, was very difficult to leave. I start to feel at home in any natural setting fairly rapidly. I cultivate my connections with place through various daily activities which assume the position of spiritual practice for me, and all of them involve either exploring or working on the land. These activities (which have included walking, bicycling, running, gardening, and other ways of being outside) are not so much choices for me, as things my body is demanding that I do. They are automatic, second nature, essential to my health and well-being. I wouldn't trade them--or some palpable form of immediate connection to the landscape--for anything in the world (except perhaps for world peace and universal enlightenment, but I don't think those would be possible anyway without my getting my "outdoors fix").
Despite my feelings of connection, I did choose to leave each of these Stopping Grounds--and I believe these choices also reflected the influence of the land. For whatever reasons, my temperament and the temperament of each of these places led us into significant "live-in" relationships that were nevertheless of limited duration. While I felt a resonance in each place between "me" and "everything-else-here," important parts of me eventually seemed to be missing, and after a year or two I felt a call to move on. Obviously, in each of these places, I also had not developed social connections strong enough for me to resist the pull of whatever new adventure lay ahead. I believe this was no accident either--had I felt that this landscape was indeed my long-term home, I would also have found a greater resonance with others there who felt that way.
I first encountered what would become Primary Home Landscape #2 when I was twenty-four. I would eventually spend a total of nearly six years living there, spread out over four different stays (two years, then two shorter periods of a few months each, then more than three years). In fact, this essay was inspired initially by a conversation with a current resident of this former Stomping Ground. His description of the influence of the land on the individuals now living there matched my own experience and my observations of the energy of the place as it has impacted hundreds of people over the years (I've stayed in touch and visited periodically even when not living there).
Stomping Ground #2 is a forty-acre parcel situated in a western Oregon valley on the east side of the Coast Range. Bisected by a creek, thirty-five of its forty acres are forested, mostly with even-aged trees which started growing after a mid-twentieth-century clearcut. There are very few flat places on the land, and none of any significant size; virtually everything is either uphill or downhill from where one is at any moment. The sides of the valley rise on both sides; there are no wide horizons or long views from ground level. All of this leads to a sensation of being "closed in."
The land itself is very beautiful, and draws one in powerfully. Even with the recent addition of some relatively conventional buildings (to replace the rustic, handmade, non-code-compliant hobbit huts that preceded them), it still retains the feel of land that is intimately present in the lives of its human inhabitants. The parcel is surrounded on three sides by timber land (with only one immediate human neighbor), with the nearest, dead-end paved road more than half a mile away. Trails both on and off of the property give one nearly endless woods (albeit all impacted in some way by industrial forestry) to explore. On-site, organic gardens, a now sustainably-managed forest, a nature reserve, and numerous appropriate technology experiments give practical expression to the back-to-the-land ethic and ecological consciousness that have motivated the stewards of this research and educational center since its founding more than two decades ago.
In its early years the group described itself as an intentional community, but more recently has seen itself as a de-facto or "unintentional" community composed of a half-dozen to a dozen staff members of the non-profit as well as shorter-term participants in its programs. In fact, the group has experienced 100% turnover in its composition (or 500%, 1000%, or more, depending on how one calculates it) since its founding. My five-and-a-half total years as a resident there were a relative anomaly, a duration exceeded by only a few others over the past twenty-three years. A few months, or a year or two, are more typical. This leads me to believe that the place and I had an unusual amount of resonance, in order for it to feel like "home" to me for so long. I also know that it no longer feels like home to me, and that I can't imagine my current self being content there.
What are the qualities that those forty acres bring out in people? Because the place seems so closed in, and because its natural qualities are so immediate and accessible, life there can seem engulfing. I, and other residents, frequently became so absorbed in our immediate surroundings that we lost perspective, forgot that the outside world (including not only other lifestyles and people, but other landscapes) existed at all. In fact, some of us were looking for that highly focused land-immersion experience, and we found a perfect place to enact it. I recall one early resident boasting that he had spent months at a time without setting foot off the property--and this was certainly an option. The work on-site was never-ending, and could (and did) absorb all of my and others' energies--and then some. Especially in the early years, travel away from the place (especially in an automobile) was discouraged by a common ecological ethic, and both the organization and the land itself seemed to bring out a fierce loyalty within the group of people who chose to immerse themselves in the place.
Had we in fact been able maintain a focused, peaceful, cooperative relationship with our surroundings, we would perhaps have been more content; but in actuality we had not forgotten about the outside world. Socio-ecological awareness was what had brought many of us to choose to invest our energies in this project. For those drawn to this place, guilt about having been raised as "American consumers" was often as strong a motivator as excitement about learning, researching, and teaching the skills of sustainable living. We were there to save the world--which, not surprisingly, can be a rather stressful occupation. In this worldview, life was hard, and was meant to be hard.
The landscape reinforced this message. Every wheelbarrow load of compost, manure, firewood, building materials, or anything else needed to be pushed uphill or restrained from careening away downhill. The lack of open, sunny areas around buildings meant that during much of the year they were damp and cold--a condition exacerbated by the founders' ideological opposition to the use of insulation, coupled with our understandable desire to conserve firewood. The diminished horizon reduced even further the already-limited amounts of sun and light available during Oregon winters. Most important, the closed-in feel of living in a mostly-wooded, depressed valley, with no flat areas, no long views, no placid bodies of water, no peaceful, truly "open" spots, seemed to produce a background anxiety that stayed with many of us almost constantly.
Some visitors remarked upon the tension they felt as soon as they set foot on the property. Others believed the place was haunted. The organization itself experienced nearly incessant struggle, both internal and external, which came to be its accepted reality. Communication was often challenging among group members. Internal political and power struggles, culminating in a lawsuit, nearly destroyed the organization in the early 1990s. The court settlement (which resulted in the eviction of a long-time member) was followed by battles with the county over zoning and building codes and another lawsuit brought by a new neighbor. During my final tenure there, two residents were evicted on separate occasions for threatening to kill other residents (luckily, as one staff member was fond of saying, "no one died"). Even among those who didn't flip out, few people seemed to experience contentment on this piece of land--but perhaps contentment was not what most people arriving there were actually striving for, since "contentment" and "saving the world" are often not conceived of as compatible states of being. For a whole host of reasons, the land and somewhat stressed-out eco-activist types (of which I was one at that point in my life) seemed mutually to call to each other, and to reinforce one another's energies.
The place has brought forth many "good works" in the world, and has inspired many people, including me, in positive ways. But nearly two decades of involvement and/or observation, as well as numerous conversations with past and present residents, have led me to believe that these patterns, which I have seen repeating themselves over and over, transcend social factors and the idiosyncrasies of the individuals who participate in this eco-social experiment. They are a product of the land itself, in constant interplay with the people who find themselves drawn there.
My solution? No, I don't suggest bulldozing one of the hillsides to expand the horizon. But awareness is the first step in any healing work, and with a little feng shui brought to bear--as well as a commitment to open communication about how everyone experiences the land and one another--new possibilities can certainly open up there.
Stomping Ground #3 is Lost Valley Educational Center, where I've been a resident for nearly seven years now. I opened this essay by describing some of the feelings this land evokes in me. Here, as with the place I've just finished discussing, I've heard many different people talk about the same phenomena, with a similar set of feelings (different, however, from those in Stomping Ground #2) evoked in diverse people by this particular environment. Here, too, the conceptual boundaries between "self" and "land" become blurry, and the feelings experienced don't have clear boundaries at all.
Lost Valley has a greater diversity of habitats than Stomping Ground #2 (resembling, in this respect, Stomping Ground #1), and different parts of the land have very different feels to them. A more mature forest surrounds many of the dwelling spaces, while a young, regenerating forest covers half of the property. Large open garden spaces and a large meadow provide the opportunity for a wide horizon, punctuated by tall trees. Our creek flows nearly year-round, and offers a swimming hole. A substantial pond beyond the meadow holds water during much of the year. The meadow itself, and much of the rest of the land, is quite wet during the rainy season. Numerous residents and visitors have remarked on the "watery" quality of the land, and the watery quality of the emotions that it tends to elicit. The place seems to plumb our internal depths, and to encourage reflection, emotional release, and acceptance. In the same way that the "closed-in" feeling of my previous home often evokes that state of being in its human inhabitants, the openness and fluidity of this land tends to bring out those qualities in people just as strongly.
The tense eco-activist who comes here is likely to have her or his defenses crumbled, and to come face-to-face with the feelings of both pain and joy, of separation and connection, that have produced that way of coping with the world. Obsolete personas and other forms of falsity and self-delusion tend to crumble too. The land not only gives its inhabitants permission to feel--by providing safety, nurturing, inspiration, and its own watery example--but it seems to elicit those feelings in everyone who comes here. It is no accident that Naka-Ima, Lost Valley's most well-known personal growth workshop, has grown and flourished on this piece of land. The land primes people for the experience of opening up, letting go, and finding a new, expanded identity--one that tends to be both more true to each individual's unique, essential nature, and more genuinely connected with other human and non-human strands in the web of life.
In the same way that a "closed-in" energy can repel visitors, this land's open, fluid energy can attract and welcome them--and apparently has always done so. Before Europeans arrived, this was a gathering spot and campground for our Native American predecessors, the Kalapuya, and in more recent times, it was the center of activities for Shiloh, a countercultural (yet fundamentalist) Christian organization which trained thousands of its followers here before sending them out to two-hundred satellite locations around the country. In those days, this property was known as The Land, and was expected to be the site of the Second Coming. Since then, under Lost Valley's tenure, it has continued to attract thousands of people. It maintains friendly relations with most of its neighbors, and a large number of people come regularly and repeatedly to visit and participate in programs--an arrangement facilitated by our relative proximity to Eugene. Such things as car-usage and other lifestyle choices, including engagement in various on-the-land sustainability activities, vary widely among residents and visitors here alike, but on site, the ethics and practices of an ecovillage predominate. As in all of my previous Stomping Grounds (and Stopping Grounds, for that matter), I get around almost all of the time on just foot or bicycle, as do others when on these eighty-seven acres--and we wouldn't want it any other way. When I consider the character of this place--which I've watched under many different circumstances and with many different populations over the years since its founding--it seems clear to me that the land is the most powerful player in what Lost Valley Educational Center is, and in what each of us experiences here.
This open, fluid energy, including this permeability to and interconnection with the outside world, does not necessarily lead to greater stability--in fact, one of the dominant qualities of Lost Valley, from an organizational and social standpoint, is that it is constantly changing and evolving. Since everything seems possible, and since clinging to "old forms" seems unnatural once someone suspects they may be obsolete, we tend frequently to try new ways of arranging our work and our daily community life. And while a closed-in feeling can sometimes lead people to stay in a situation longer than might be healthy for them (since it seems there's no way out), an open feeling can contribute to much more rapid decisions not just to change something, but to leave, when a resident recognizes that she or he is not happy. A case in point: by the end of this summer, much to my amazement (and occasional distress--I'd like a little more stability), I will be the second-most-senior human resident here. Aside from Stripes the cat and other elements of the non-human landscape, only Dianne, who's been here since she co-founded Lost Valley in 1989, will have been here longer.
The land's fluid qualities have affected me personally as well. Although no one will accuse me of being an overly wild and crazy guy, many of my ideas about life and about myself have loosened up and changed significantly since those relatively closed-in years at Stomping Grounds #2. Guilt, desperate save-the-world ideas, and various "shoulds" have lost their appeal as prime motivating factors in my life. At some point, I noticed that the more energy I put into what I love, rather than into pre-conceived ideas of what would be "good things to do," the more I find that same energy coming back to me. In contrast to what eventually seemed like the futility of some of my previous forms of struggle, making the choice to follow my heart and do what I love gives me the actual experience of the world becoming a more loving, sustainable place. As of yesterday, I still occasionally fell prey to fear and limitation; I still sometimes struggled in my attempts to open up and be honest when many of my impulses were to censor myself; I still hesitated and found myself erring on the side of caution more than I would have liked. But even as of yesterday, the many wonders of the land here--including its numerous, exuberantly vocal birds, its varied vegetation, its soil, its vistas, and the people it has influenced--had opened me up in ways inconceivable to me a decade ago. And today is a new day--a perspective that is an obvious, palpable reality to me as I experience this place.
A pileated woodpecker is calling, with its almost-human cackle, suggesting to me that, by wrapping up this essay in the very near future, I might still avoid becoming a laughing stock. That's just as well--I've realized that I'm actually more of an amateur naturalist, musician, underground comedian, and person interested in long, wandering conversations, connections with the rest of life, and "being here now," than I am a writer or editor anyway. For all of this, I have the land to thank. Or maybe I should say "I" have the land to thank...but even that doesn't accurately portray it.
Ultimately, I believe, it is the land, and the spirit behind the land, that are doing the thanking--because in the big picture, in the unity of our differentiated world, nothing seems truly separate from that... (not even that pileated woodpecker, calling again, laughing at my attempts to describe the indescribable)...
Chris Roth edits Talking Leaves, coordinates Lost Valley's organic vegetable gardens, has become a perpetual enrollee in local Lost Creek watershed bird classes, and is recovering, perhaps ungracefully, from a serious case of writer's block (an underrated, unjustly disparaged condition which can also be described as the cultivation of one's observative, meditative, and musical sides). Contact him at [email protected]. His foresighted, camera-ready mother Nancy Roth's website is www.RevNancyRoth.org.
©2004 Talking Leaves
Spring/Early Summer 2004
Volume 14, Numbers 1 & 2
Person and Place: Adventures Here, There, & Everywhere