Where does place belong?

Considering the commitments necessary to a good life

Theo von Brockhusen, City Square

A couple weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing Wendell Berry’s work and love of place. We wondered together: Is fidelity to place (loving our communities, and caring for them) a primary love? In other words, is loving place antecedent to demonstrating other forms of membership and commitment? Or is love of place optional: one of many potential ways one might live out the calling to fidelity and care? Can we neglect love of place without doing tangible harm?

If I remember rightly, Pete Davis argues the latter in a conversation with Chuck Marohn about his book Dedicated (which we read together last February). Davis’s thoughtful book suggests that one might exemplify the virtues of a “long-haul hero” in multiple ways. Fidelity to place is one of those ways—but it isn’t required of all people.

I am inclined to agree. There are multiple important jobs and vocations that require a degree of transience. In many circumstances, one might prioritize place to the detriment of family or other loved ones. We generally choose people over place, and we’re right to do so.

But I want to define love of place a little more deeply, because I think—at least in the United States—we don’t practice it enough to know what it is, or what it should be. It could be that we completely misunderstand love of place, and therefore do not understand how it relates to our other loves.

A couple thoughts I’ve been mulling over since that conversation with my friend:

1. Love of place shouldn’t be confused with romanticizing place. We might “love” Paris for its beauty and its buildings, or long to live on the beach in Hawaii. Neither of those sentiments are truly love. To love a place ought to require vulnerability, intention, fidelity, and care. It should require seeing a place’s brokenness alongside its beauty. This means that whatever we mean when we say we “love” a place, it’s more complex and emotionally fraught than meets the eye. It only happens after we’ve lived someplace long enough to develop a relatively thorough understanding of its problems, beauties, and struggles.

2. What do we love, specifically, if we love a place? Are we talking about flora and fauna, streets and buildings, culture and community? I would love your thoughts on this. But my guess/gut feeling is that love of place is ecological. It encompasses the whole. It’s not just the streets and buildings, but it includes them. It’s not just about the local library’s Thursday evening concerts, but they’re a part of it. It’s not a love you can reduce. It encompasses all the different facets of your place. A quote from Berry’s Sabbath Poems gets at this:

   “Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
   your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
   who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
   and the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
   fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
   in the trees in the silence of the fisherman
   and the heron, and the trees that keep the land
   they stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.”

   As Berry points out here, it’s the old man, the fish, the heron, the birds, the trees—the entirety of the ecosystem that makes up a place—that we ought to love.

3. A person could live in a community their entire lives without demonstrating a single form of outreach, accountability, or care. Living in place doesn’t automatically translate into loving place. But loving place, when and where it happens, forms the act of dwelling into an intentional activity. How do we undergo that transformation? I think it depends on our circumstances, finances, location, and more. It seems true in most cases, however, that we have to 1) embrace some form of associational life, 2) care about our landscape/environmental health, and 3) take our own habits seriously.

4. We only ever love people somewhere. Our loves exist within a context, community, and ecology. And that context matters. Sure, we might move. But then the loves we display inhabit that new ecology, and will flourish if and when we take that ecology seriously. Virtual relationships exist, to be sure. They can be quite meaningful. But they are not a replacement for physical proximity, or the forms of service and care proximity promotes.

5. Considering all the above: what if loving place is not, in fact, some sort of precursor for other loves, or even an equal yet optional form of love—but instead the culmination of all those loves? What if love of place doesn’t come first, but last? If Simone Weil is right, it’s when we care for our families, friends, neighbors, churches, mosques, synagogues, local government, and local institutions—the grid of loves that form each of the “roots” she identifies in her book The Need For Roots—that we become deeply attached to the place all those individuals and institutions exist within. Love of place arises because we’ve nurtured other loves. Not the other way around.

This would then explain why someone can live in place their entire lives without demonstrating a single act of care or intention. Unless we’re nurturing forms of affection and care that reach across the threads and webwork of community, society, and neighborhood, we will not see our places with the sort of intentionality that results in love.

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What do you think?

How do we grow to love place?

Is loving a specific place something we can choose to do or not do?

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More about books, essays, recipes, etc. in the days to come! Happy Friday to you all!