Journal of a Sabbatical

querencia

September 23, 1997

Previous Entry Journal Index   Links du jour: Walking Toward Walden with John Hanson Mitchell	querencia - place, habit (Spanish) tuwanasaapi - the center of the universe, the place that is right for you (Hopi)   "Experiences occur in places conducive to them, or they do not occur at all." - Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place "Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling as feeling about history partakes of place." - Eudora Welty, "Place in Fiction" "There's no place like home. There's no place like home." - Dorothy   "No place is place until it has had a poet." - Wallace Stegner, "A Sense of Place"                     later that same day Oh darn, world.std.com is not answering the phone again. I hate this. This must be the slow lane on the information highway. All three or four readers who still pay attention to this journal will have to wait til the coming morrow to read today's bizarre ramblings from my [insert your favorite adjective here] mind. And I know yesterday's entry was a great disappointment to you all. Me too. I hate it when writer's block extends to even a simple journal entry. it's back Ah, one more try and finally world.std.com acknowledges my existence or at least my modem's signal. So y'all get to read this tonight after all.	The on-line Spanish-English dictionary translated querencia as "habit", but it is also used to mean a preferred place or love of home. So I guess you could say querencia and tuwanasaapi refer to the same concept. In Walking Toward Walden, John Hanson Mitchell describes this concept of querencia: : In a larger sense, though, the term connotes a deep sense of wellbeing that is associated with a given spot on earth, a sort of personal identity with a place that arises from the fact that the world there is known to you, that its history is your history, that the fruits and flowers, the scents of the earth, the days and nights, and seasonal changes are a part of your personal past. I guess this partly explains my bizarre attachment to Massachusetts. Would I be the same me someplace else? I don't know. The Navajo believe, so I'm told, that you can't be Navajo away from the territory of the sacred mountain. Yet I still have the feeling that by not moving away from my home state I missed some important developmental stage - like I'm locked in a perpetual adolescence, never to reach adulthood. Sort of like the way I feel about never having been married. It's not that I've ever wanted to flee Massachusetts or ever wanted to marry in the conventional heterosexual sense, it's just that I feel left behind as others matured and moved on into the various stages of adulthood. Here I am at midlife and I live about 45 miles from the city I was born in. When I was at Priscilla's house this afternoon, we were talking about her neighborhood in Lawrence. The guy next door lives in the house he was born in. Priscilla was born in Andover, but within walking distance of her current home in Lawrence. There are many people in that situation. Yet somehow it seems un-American. As if it is every American's duty to move on. I once worked with a guy who made it a point to move every two years at the most. Sometimes more frequently. I have no idea what place meant to him, only that he didn't stay in one very long. I don't know what place means to me, except that I seem to stay in one way too long. I was going to write about this yesterday and I just couldn't get it out the end of the fingers. Reading Walking Toward Walden, I felt a certain resonance with the landscape Mitchell was describing. I recognize the landscape. I know the trees, the birds, the rocks if not intimately then at least in passing. Last year at the Environmental Writers Conference, Mitchell read some passages from it about a landscape I do know intimately: The land at this point is impoverished - gravelly soils, the trail lined with sweet ferns and goldenrod and asters - and there are signs of horses everywhere, droppings and hoof prints intertwined with the ruts of mountain bikes and dirt bikes. I believe we are coming to a quarry I know of ... ... Barkley claims that the land we are now passing through is in fact a real wasteland, not a metaphorical one. Gravel trucks have attacked this place. For two hundred acres or more the land in front of us has been stripped of its original vegetation: the oaks, maples, elms, white ash; the laurel, blueberries, viburnum, the grapevines; ... Machines have dug at the very foundation of the earth, raked away the thousand-year-old topsoil and dug down into the ancient layers of gravel deposited by the glacier some fifteen thousand years ago. My cubicle at MASSCOMP looked out over that gravel pit, which Mitchell refers to as "this pit of hell" later in that paragraph. Over that gravel pit, I saw a pair of red tailed hawks who hunted together daily. Male and female. They were after the rodents stirred up by the gravel mining operation. I watched them almost every afternoon. When I moved into a walled office with a door, the one thing I missed was the hawks. I used to go check on them from time to time, making sure they were still patrolling their territory over the gravel pit. That's also where I first saw a killdeer do the broken wing distraction display to lure me (me, a predator?) away from the baby killdeers. I saw kestrels there too, and sometimes I'd hear them when I walked to the parking lot after work. So, I kinda disagree with Mitchell's pal Barkley that the pit is a wasteland. Despite the best human efforts to lay it waste, life still thrives there.
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