I think this is right about our sense of place: Some people believe that wisdom comes from above, from an authoritative voice in the heavens. Others believe that there is an order within the cosmos, and that wisdom is living wisely within that order, right now, right here, on the Earth.
And if you take that view from the level of humanity to the individual that is me, wisdom means finding a way to live within the order of the place I live.
We humans carry that wisdom in stories.
In his essay “Telling the Holy,” Scott Russell Sanders argues that we catch glimpses of the way to live in ways that better reflect the natural order and capture those insights in sacred stories, or myths. We humans tell all kinds of stories — stories that convey information and statistics and news about everything from politics to baseball. But it’s those stories about how to live that hold us.
I think a sense of place is essential. I think these lines from Sanders’s essay are wonderful:
I am bound to the earth by a web of stories, just as I am bound to creation by the very substance and rhythms of my flesh. By keeping the stories fresh, I keep the places themselves alive in my imagination. Living in me, borne in mind, these places make up the landscape on which I stand with familiarity and pleasure, the landscape over which I walk even when my feet are still.
• Source: Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 150.
No comments:
Post a Comment