Readings:

Responsive Reading #465: "The Wisdom to Survive" by Wendell Berry

In "A Native Hill," Wendell Berry writes about the road builders who arrived in Kentucky in 1797:
 

I think that the comparison of these road builders with the Indians, on the one hand, and with Old World peasants on the other, is a most suggestive one. The Indians and the peasants were people who belonged deeply and intricately to their places. Their ways of life had evolved slowly in accordance with their knowledge of their land, of its needs, of their own relation of dependence and responsibility to it. The road builders, on the contrary, were placeless people... Having left Europe far behind, they had not yet in any meaningful sense arrived in America, not yet having devoted themselves to any part of it in a way that would produce the intricate knowledge of it necessary to live in it without destroying it. Because they belonged to no place, it was almost inevitable that they should behave violently toward the places they came to. We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America. And in spite of our great reservoir of facts and methods, in comparison to the deep earthly wisdom of established peoples, we still know but little.

But my understanding of this curiously parabolic fragment of history will not be complete until I have considered more directly that the occasion of this particular violence was the building of a road. It is obvious that one who values the idea of community cannot speak against roads without risking all sorts of absurdity. It must be noticed, nevertheless, that the predecessor to this first road was "nothing but an Indian trail passing the wilderness"--a path. The Indians, then, who had the wisdom and the grace to live in this country for perhaps ten thousand years without destroying or damaging any of it, needed for their travels no more than a footpath, but their successors, who in a century and a half plundered the area of at least half its topsoil and virtually all of its forest, felt immediately that they had to have a road. My interest is not in the question of whether or not they needed the road, but in the fact that the road was then, and is now, the most characteristic form of their relation to the country.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity of movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.

From the journal of Fellowship member Lynn Carlson, upon the destruction of a ravine to make way for Highway 441:
 

I walked innocently toward my ravine, as I had the day before and the day before that, back eight years now. When did I first sense the difference? I cannot remember. Was my first clue the sight of the bulldozer? The bare sky filling in where green leaves should be? In the pit of my stomach I knew; I could not turn back--I must say "I'm sorry" and "good-bye." I approached the demolition with slowed step and felt overcome by the destruction. There [the trees] lay, crisscrossed, still green with life--gasping? I felt the incredible void in the open space that had provided my spring trillium and muddy March thaw, where I had tiptoed my way over flowing melting ice and snow streams to the approaching incline (mud on my soles)... The spring bird songs--I stand still and watch and listen. I walk to the river to watch the water flow, following a path shared by others--this path soon to be traversed by four lanes of fast-moving vehicles, never to be foot-trodden again. I feel the horror, sadness and loss as I stand amongst my dying friends. I am powerless, except for my tears and "I'm sorry." I cry, I stand amongst the destruction, I feel so violated and sorry. Thoughts of a war zone cross my mind. Thoughts of a tornado passing--if only it had been a disaster of nature, it is somehow easier to accept. My very special spot I say good-bye to, I say I have loved the life you have shared with me, I cry again and say I am sorry. I cannot walk back this way until more time passes. I will miss you and never forget you. Thank you and good bye, Your dear friend, Lynn.

I first learned the power of place from David Edsel, back when I was eight-years-old. That summer, my family took an eight-week trip through the western United States and Canada. At the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington's Olympic National Park, a ranger named David Edsel led us on a guided nature walk. Edsel, a middle-aged man who was a biology teacher during the school year, spoke with a significant speech impediment. The care and time he took with his words added to the passion of his message. He spoke about the long history of the place, going back millions of years. He talked about all the animals and insects and people which had inhabited the woods. He spoke to us about the fragile ecosystem that was the rain forest. He pointed out rotting logs which were providing a nurturing home to new trees. These rotting logs are called nursing logs. More than anything, he communicated not only with his beautiful words, but with every fiber of his being, that we were walking through a sacred place. My family was fortunate enough to go on another guided walk with the same ranger three years later. The fact that I remember his name twenty-one years after the second visit attests to the influence this man had on me.

I have tried to remember David Edsel's message about the power of place. It isn't always easy. I live in a culture which does not and has never put much emphasis on place. For many in our American culture, place just doesn't mean very much.

The roots of this go way back, indeed probably back as far as the earliest humans, who most likely were wanderers. As far back as we can historically remember, there has been a tension between the wandering spirit and the spirit that compels people to cast deep roots in one place over generations. In our own country, though, we seem to have tilted decisively toward the wandering spirit. We have glorified the Pilgrims and the pioneers, while at the same time labeling families that stay put for generations as stuck, losers, hicks, inbred. Writes Scott Russell Sanders in his book Staying Put:

Claims for the virtues of shifting ground are familiar and seductive to Americans, this nation of restless movers. From the beginning, our heroes have been sailors, explorers, cowboys, prospectors, speculators, backwoods ramblers, rainbow-chasers, vagabonds of every stripe. Our Promised Land has always been over the next ridge or at the end of the trail, never under our feet... Stand still, we are warned, and you die. [Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put, pp. 104-05]

As a people, we have always been more focused on getting somewhere than staying someplace. This is even evident with our quest to land on the moon: our goal was to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth. Once accomplished, it was time to move on.

Today, this American heritage is increasingly played out in our inclination to see place as basically incidental to work. Pretending or believing place doesn't really matter, we are often willing to move almost anywhere for a job. Our corporate culture treats transferring employees like it's no big deal. Something like seventeen percent of Americans move in a given year. The result is that many of us are displaced people, without deep roots anywhere.

Another contemporary phenomenon which works to diminish the power of place is what I call the "mallification" of America. With our malls and strip roads and fast-food, motel, and store chains, we are increasingly making one place look just like the next. Take a freeway exit and you have to think for a moment: am I at the Fox River Mall or am I in a suburb of Dallas? Is this Seattle or the Maine Mall in Portland, Maine? Again, the result is a feeling of rootlessness and being displaced.

Yet another contemporary phenomenon which diminishes the power of place is the amount of time we spend indoors, often separated from the place on which the building or house is located. We live much of our lives inside, in artificially lighted, cooled and heated space, oblivious to the natural world which used to be our home.

As a people, we continue to choose the road over the path. This choice has enormous implications not only for our understanding of place, but for where and how we live our lives and for how we treat the places in which we live.

My philosophy of place is built on a different vision, a vision in many ways more in tune with the path than the road. There are five foundations for my philosophy of place. The first foundation mirrors a foundation for my understanding of time: it is that space is so enormous that it often eludes our comprehension. Since Copernicus, Western humanity has struggled to comprehend our new understanding of the cosmos and our planet's place in it. Gone is the view of the earth as the center of a small universe of planets and stars. Gone, too, is the artificial sense of our importance derived from being at the center of the universe. Instead, we have a picture of our radical insignificance. We still haven't fully comprehended this big picture, I think. We know now--at least scientifically--that our planet orbits an ordinary, average-sized yellow star. We know that our solar system is located at the inner edge of one of the great spiral arms of our galaxy, a galaxy that has some hundred thousand million stars in it, a galaxy that would take a hundred thousand light years to cross. Our nearest neighboring star is Proxima Centauri, which is four light years, or twenty-three million million miles, away. (By comparison, our sun is only eight light minutes away.) And our galaxy is but one of hundreds of thousands of millions of galaxies in our universe. And we don't have any idea whether ours is the only universe. Scott Sanders writes, "Who, grasping [this], can avoid feeling vertigo?" I would add: Who, grasping this, can avoid feeling the sheer enormity of space and the radical insignificance of our little corner of it? No wonder some people continue to reject this cosmological view, preferring to carry on the grand arrogance of thinking the earth is at the center of things.

As if the sheer enormity of the universe isn't enough, there is something even more outrageous. Somehow, we have to see the whole universe as our home. We have to understand that though we are insignificant, we nevertheless are an integral and important part of the web of existence that comprises this nearly infinite number of galaxies and stars, and the even more overwhelming space between. How can we see this entire vastness of space as our home?

I would suggest that we can start by knowing and understanding and appreciating the tiny slice of the earth that we call home. Our knowledge and understanding and appreciation of our local home is necessary grounding for an understanding of the whole world and even the whole universe as home. Without appreciating the place we are, we will never be able to understand the whole universe as our home. Sanders suggests that we need to keep two images in mind in order to achieve this understanding: the picture of earth from the moon, and the view out the nearest window.

The second foundation of my philosophy of place is that there is tremendous power in place. We diminish the importance of place at our own peril. Why is place so powerful? I am convinced that place is important because the very well-being of our bodies, minds and spirits depends on a healthy relationship with the place in which we live. The places we live influence our actions, thoughts and feelings. The places we live mold us and shape our identity. Who I am is shaped by living in coastal Maine and the south side of Chicago during college and graduate school. Who I am is shaped by my familiarity with southern Indiana and northeastern Wisconsin, where I have lived as an adult. Who I am is shaped by my year on Nantucket Island and all of my travels near and far. And who I am is most powerfully shaped by Michigan, where I was born and raised.

Because the places we live are so powerful, I think they demand our attentiveness and even our reverence. The places we live call us to connect deeply with them, not to live as if they don't matter. They call us to understand and appreciate the unique features of our place, not to tear down these features in an effort to make our place look just like everywhere else in America.

The third foundation of my philosophy of place comes from our Unitarian Universalist belief that we are part of an interdependent web of all existence. There is an implication of this belief in the interdependent web that is often overlooked; it is one I have shared with you before. It is that there is and can be no split between the sacred and the profane. All space--all places--are related in the one great reality that is the web of life. You cannot separate some space out and call it sacred while labeling other space as profane. Belief in the interdependent web of all existence demands that we conceive of all places as sacred: the county land-fill every bit as much as the waterfront in Door County or the Hoh Rain Forest. Given the interdependence of everything, you see, the place that we have made a land-fill effects the web just as much as the beautiful waterfront, and what we do effects the place where the landfill is as much as the lakeshore.

This view of all space as sacred runs counter to the traditional Western viewpoint that only some space is sacred. In my view, this traditional view has been disastrous. It has allowed us to move away from the belief that everything is sacred to box the sacred into little reservations. After awhile, then we can even refuse to see the sacred in these little reservations. Further, this belief has allowed us to rape and pillage places we have not designated as sacred.

There are a few more implications of our belief in the interdependent web. First, if every place is sacred, then wherever we are at a given moment can and should be seen as sacred. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn tell us that wherever we are sitting is "your own spot. It is on this very spot and at this very moment that you can become enlightened. You don't have to sit under a special tree in a distant land." [Thich Nhat Hahn, The Miracle of Mindfulness, p. 36] Wherever your place is, make it a holy center.

Another implication is to beware of another sacred/profane split: the split between earth and heaven. One of the reasons I don't believe in heaven is that if we consider heaven to be the ultimate in sacred space, then it necessarily makes the earth--our home--something less than ultimately sacred. Too often, this has been destructive for the earth. "The heaven-bent," writes Berry, "have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by their inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately." [Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays, p. 101]

This understanding of all space as sacred leads me to the fourth foundation for my philosophy of place. This foundation is the ethical dimension of my philosophy of place. Put simply, believing that all space is sacred demands that we treat all space as sacred. We can begin to do this by shedding the idea that any of us can "own" the places we live in any deeply significant way. We may possess a title for the place where we live, but that is little more than a piece of paper. We don't own the place. We share the places we live, with the other creatures and matter which also live in or on it, and with the people and creatures and matter which have lived in that place in the past. Amy and I (or our bank) don't really own our little lot (officially known as Lot 14 in Block 6 of the Hyde and Harriman's Addition in Appleton's Fifth Ward). We share it--with the trees and plants and grass, with the stones and trees that comprise our house, with the worms and the rabbits and the birds that land in our trees, with Ric Ballin and the other people that have lived in the house before us, with the native Americans that probably once upon a time perhaps had a path through our lot, with the settlers who cut down the forest and turned our place into farmland, with the surrounding neighborhood that comprises our community, and with the very earth itself. We are but temporary co-inhabitants.

Rather than living as if we own the land, we need to live as if we share the land. We need to live as if every action we take will impact not only the place, but, more broadly, the interdependent web of all existence. We can then weigh every action by focusing on how it will effect the life and health of the interdependent web of existence. At times we may determine that destruction of part of a particular place might be in the best interests of the great web of life. But at least we will have thought about it and been intentional about it.

Given today's technology, this ethic is of increasingly critical importance. As Sanders suggests, "A man with a bull-dozer can make a graver mistake in one day than a whole tribe with digging sticks can make in a year." [Sanders, pp. 111-112] This ethic would certainly be helpful around these parts as we consider the question of land use. (I wonder if the land use question isn't skewed by all of the freight carried in the words "land use." Do we need to be "using" the land?) Almost daily around here, some place that was a farmer's field or an orchard or wilderness gets bulldozed to make way for a new store or gas station or business. Just look at what has happened with Highway 441: the road not only destroyed Lynn's ravine and anything else in its path, but it also has had a tremendous on the surrounding land for miles around the freeway. For example, Fellowship member Ed Culhane recently wrote a wonderful column in the Post-Crescent on a man who mourned the destruction of a woods for a new Menards near a 441 exit. [Post-Crescent, December 25, 1994, page D-10]

The questions of land use are never easy. For instance, my feelings about Highway 441 are profoundly ambiguous. I like to drive on 441. Even more importantly, I like the fact that our new Fellowship land is located within a quarter mile of a 441 exit ramp. That location is going to help this congregation better serve the large region from which we draw; it's going to help us meet our mission. It's going to help this little corner of the interdependent web thrive. If we are honest with ourselves, feelings about land use are seldom unambiguous.

I know, too, that the food I eat comes from farmland that once was probably prairie or woods, that the metal in the cars I drive comes from a mine somewhere and was probably not extracted from the ground in an earth-friendly way, that the fuel that heats my home and powers my cars comes from the earth. Given my lifestyle, to suggest that I embrace a totally earth-friendly ethic would be totally hypocrisy. All that I'm suggesting is that we at least think carefully about the impact on the interdependent web before acting, that we act with our eyes open to the consequences of our actions. Too often this kind of consideration is absent. Too often the only concern seems to be how many jobs will be created and how much economic development will be spurred.

The final foundation of my philosophy is that place, like time, is a gift of the universe. We must treat the places we live as such. Wherever we are, we need to be aware of this gift, and to express our gratitude. This was another lesson I learned on those nature walks with ranger David Edsel. The incredible beauty of the Hoh Rain Forest was not there because of anything he or any human being did. All David Edsel did was recognize the beauty of the place and revel in it. And then he gave thanks to the universe for its creation of that place. Perhaps that is the task each of us has in whatever place we find ourselves.

Berry, Wendell, Collected Poems--1957-1982 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984).

Berry, Wendell, Recollected Essays--1965-1980 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981).

Culhane, Ed, "Trees Hold Childhood Memories" in Post-Crescent (December 25, 1994, p. D-10).

Flood, Raymond and Lockwood, Michael, eds., The Nature of Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

Gallagher, Winifred, The Power of Place (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993).

Hahn, Thich Nhat, The Miracle of Mindfulness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).

Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time (Toronto: Bantam, 1988).

Lustbader, Wendy, Counting on Kindness.

Norris, Kathleen, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993).

Sanders, Scott Russell, Staying Put (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).