Rooted

Finding connection to place

When I think about the places I’ve lived, I often think about the land first. The green trees and farms of central New Jersey where I grew up, the lush rainy green of Seattle where I moved after college and first started backpacking, the dry golden summers and foggy cold beaches of Northern California where I moved for grad school and have stayed ever since. I don’t feel like I associate places with people as much as I do with the land. Even when I’ve lived in really urban places, like Oakland, CA, I think of the urban farm I had there, the amazing food I was able to grow beneath the sound of a BART train, and the secret gardens of friends which hid amongst the buildings and people.

But when I think about the place where we live now, I’m not sure I’ve yet rooted to this land. I wonder how long it really takes to feel at home in a place, to feel like the plants and animals and earth really know you and to feel the connection in your bones. After just two years here, I feel like we’ve already found the rhythm of the seasons and learned how different they are from those in the Bay Area we moved from. We mostly have winter and summer, and the precious days of spring and fall are fleeting and treasured as they nestle between the more dominant times of heat and cold. We’ve learned some of the plants here too, the junipers which thrive in this high desert landscape, and the resilient plants like lomatium, horehound and wild chamomile which grow abundantly and offer gifts of strong medicine from their leaves and roots. But I’m not sure what really makes it feel like you belong to a place. Michael says you can feel connected to a place even when it is indifferent to you.

There are several big hills which our house faces, and their shape is like the reclining form of a woman, showing her profile of face, breast, hip. It feels like she watches over us and it makes me wonder who else has noticed her presence and looked to her as a guardian. We sit at the top of a giant valley, and our hills are the gateway to National Forest just beyond our road. I say “our” but they are not ours, they are here before and after and without us. The land has not claimed us, though we try to claim it, with our language and our practices. It reminds me of the historical ways that people have been separated from their lands - first through the restriction and removal of language and then through physical removal and dislocation. From the Gaels to the Native Americans, indigenous peoples around the world have been uprooted from their lands for centuries. So, how does one go about the reverse - rooting to a place that may not be your ancestral land, but is where you live, where you eat, where you raise your family?

Growing food and raising animals here feels like part of it. Rooting to the seasons, cycles, lives and deaths of a place certainly deepens your own feeling of place. I think also, the hardships and trials have made us feel a kind of kinship with the land. Like we are gaining a resilience from this place that we didn’t have, and didn’t need in more hospitable locales. The rituals that we engage in also seem to help.. the splitting of firewood, the sharing of meals, the morning tea on the porch in summer and the golden light of fall that always travels across our dinner table as we approach the equinox. It seems like the passing of time is important but it can’t be just that. It is the minerals and nutrients of the earth seeping into our veins, the dirt under our fingernails. But perhaps it is still too early to feel rooted after only two years here. How long until our roots travel down to taste the groundwater, send out shoots, and feel the pulse of this place? Are you rooted where you live? How do you know?