As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.
Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.
Environment...the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.
But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.
My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.
But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.
All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.
As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.
Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.
Environment...the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.
But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.
My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.
But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.
All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.