Landscape Runs Through All of Us

a charcoal and acrylic rock sketch

I have a strong sense that there are places that know us in ways distinct from how we know them. It’s not necessarily a deeper knowing, but a different knowing. An intimacy of sorts between humans and place: shared history, memory, chemistry. Shared planet and atmosphere and a common genesis in that great ol’ Big Bang.

But also, quite possibly, a place can have a profound awareness of an individual. A landscape, a river, a mountain, a rock - any particular place or many of them - can know you in ways you may never know it.

In his book The Old Ways, Robert Mcfarlane wrote, “Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain.” To me this makes sense as science seems clear that we’re all made of the same elemental star stuff. Many cultures know the world with this sense of fluidity between us and all else and even within the materialist reality most of us inhabit, a person can love their home with profound attachment. Maybe we are as much place as person. Maybe landscape runs through all of us.

What might you say to that place that knows you?

much love,

Rosie