In this episode, we explore what it is that makes a place seem important and special in a personal way…
There was a lovely post on LinkedIn the other day from my colleague Bard Papegaaij, reflecting on that theme of ‘Country’ that we explored here a couple of months ago.
He and his wife have been going through much the same experience as I have, though somewhat in the opposite direction, as you’ll see. As he describes in the post:
…circumstances largely beyond our control have forced my wife and I to relocate back to the country we were born in, The Netherlands, and leave our country of choice, Australia, behind.
That process, happening in the midst of the COVID pandemic, was messy, hectic and rather painful at times. But the transition is behind us now and we are settling into our new home, in a beautiful forest in the north of the country.
Yet for them it’s been much more than just a change of location:
One interesting thing I am noticing is how the country seems to be reclaiming me. After living in Australia for more than 20 years, I felt (and still feel at times) more Australian than Dutch. I came back to this country feeling a stranger in a strange land; a visitor to a country that didn't look much like the country I left behind in the previous century.
But in the past few months, that feeling has been changing. Gradually, I am beginning to feel my old roots - the ones I thought I had severed and discarded when I migrated to Australia - come to life again and take hold in the soil of the forest around me. I am beginning to recognise the feel of the sand under my feet, the sounds of the birds and insects, the smell of the grass and the surrounding trees. And I am beginning to feel Home again.
Again, ‘Home’ is something much deeper than just the house, the mere physical place where we live, as Bard further explains:
…it is not the nation or its people that is reclaiming me, but its Nature, its soil, its COUNTRY. … Here in The Netherlands, I feel I am welcomed back and told I do belong here; that I never stopped belonging here, no matter how far away I was.
Yet what is it that tells us we are welcome and wanted, that we are home, that we belong? I do know that feeling; and yet I also know, all too well, how easy it is to lose that feeling, to lose one’s place, to lose that certainty of knowing who we are through our connection with where we are.
Losing one’s place in that sense is hard…
And yet that phrase ‘Losing your place’ immediately reminds me of an essay of that name, written by Sue Clifford and Angela King, describing the concept and experience of particularity, or ‘local distinctiveness’:
The main players fall silent, the filming is over, the recording is finished, but the sound engineer has hushed everyone to get some ‘atmos’. Coughs, car noise echoing off the warehouses, birdsong, boards creaking, trees breathing in the wind, these are the sounds of the everyday, so particular to this place, that to cut the film and add studio voiceovers needs an underlay of this local atmosphere in order to ensure continuity and authenticity.
That elusive particularity, so often undervalued as ‘background noise’, is as important as the stars. It is the richness we take for granted.
How do we know where we are in time and space? How do we understand ourselves in the world?
That’s from a small collection of essays on ‘Local Distinctiveness’ - though sadly no longer in print - that was published by Common Ground UK some thirty years ago now. My own rather battered copy, shown in the image below, is still one of my favourite books.
Common Ground UK started out as a small project to identify and, wherever practicable, to repair and resuscitate the old apple-orchards of England, and the literally thousands of varieties of apples that they had formerly held. From there, the project expanded to look at the nature of place - very much in the sense described by Bard Papegaaij above - and thence to help people to create parish-maps as a celebration of place.
And behind each of these, as Clifford and King describe in that essay on ‘Losing Your Place’, lies that notion of particularity or local-distinctiveness:
It is characterised by elusiveness, it is instantly recognisable yet difficult to describe. It is simple yet may have profound meaning for us. It demands a poetic quest and points up the shortcomings in all those attempts to understand the things around us by compartmentalising them, fragmenting, quantifying, reducing.
Local distinctiveness is essentially about places and our relationship with them. It is as much about the commonplace as the rare, about the everyday as much as the endangered, and about the ordinary as much as the spectacular.
Yet it’s not just a concept: it’s an experience, that we can reach by the simple habit of noticing, allowing ourselves to become aware of the subtler signs and signals of the world around us - another theme we’ve explored several times in earlier episodes here.
And to help us build that habit of noticing, Common Ground provided a kind of active-checklist of themes to watch for in our lived environment. It’s shown as an alphabetic list on the ‘Rules of local distinctiveness’ page on their website, but it’s also beautifully illustrated in graphic form on the cover of the ‘Local Distinctiveness’ book above, and even more on the Local Distinctiveness poster that’s still available from the Common Ground webshop.
(True, some at least of the items on that checklist are very English - but they’d still all act as examples for how to apply the same principles of particularity in other cultures’ experience of place.)
And this sense of connection-with-place can apply to much more than just physical places, physical spaces. The same notions of particularity and self-distinctiveness likewise make sense in terms of our organisations-as-place, our family-as-place, our shared-enterprise-as place. And ‘country’ too, in all of the complexity of that term, and our own rich, multi-layered experience of that term.
Something worth exploring more, I suspect, as the world changes around us faster and faster with each passing day.
Great article Tom. In my book that nobody except relatives has purchased and nobody except my editor and me have read, I am discussing the notion of an individual's character ( his/her stable personality), its emergence in context, and the notion of compatibility between it and its meta-context, one's expanded place of emergence (expanded in the sense of nature and culture, where culture combines the imposed political distortions and history). I am an immigrant, I worked and lived in many places, and after more than three decades of "research" I still don't' have a 100% match, although Canada is my home. The thing is that context and your understanding of it change, hence the "home" you left, at least on the surface, is not the "home" you return to.
But then, I have not returned except as a tourist and I am extrapolating on that basis ....