Place Matters

Last week a local reporter asked me for homesteading tips that people with no homesteading experience can do right now in order to ease the stress of this time of the coronavirus. My answers were about gardening, new skills, cooking and resourcefulness.

I had imagined that this Clara’s Creamery blogpost would center on the same themes. In my prewriting I listed all the foods I have foraged and fermented. I went back in my google photos to the harvest time and downloaded several pictures of my gorgeous beets. As I ruminated on my experiences and any skills I have learned, I found my thoughts centering less on gardening and more on HOME.

Maine, like many states, is under a stay at home order. No longer are jobs & careers, schooling, traveling, lessons, volunteer & educational opportunities, church and friends pulling us away from home. Being HOME is the focal point of our lives. This gives us an opportunity to learn to love where we live and to more fully live where we live.

I believe that place matters. Our physical homes, our neighborhoods, our cities. This sense of belonging extends to the communities we belong to and to our very selves. This is a unique time. Being home gives us the opportunity to deliberately foster a richer and more sustaining way of life.

My eyes flood with tears when I think about “rootedness”, about place, about “membership”, as Wendell Berry calls it. I do not have words for the cumulative impact of place, of my home with its sacred history. I am attached to place, to HOME. I have an appreciation for its beauty and the stewardship it requires of me. I have loved it with my labor and an intentional journey to belong to it. My home is the starting point from which I enter into my neighborhood, my church, my extended family, my city, and my workplace- more grounded and healthy and resilient because of belonging, and ready to extend belonging to these places and people.

Our ties to all that lies outside of our homes have been loosened. Now is an opportune time to develop and revive a sense of place and community. We can engage with the solid ground of place, of HOME, which very well may come in part through gardening.