I think I found my place.
We—that is the people I come from on all sides—have been on the move for a century, each generation doing their bit to move a little farther in a lifetime, or a lot farther, depending on the circumstances. We’ve moved for all kinds of reasons: refuge, survival, opportunity, community. And here I am. After leaving the place I grew up in and making half a dozen big moves, I find myself here, in a place I would very much like to be from in some substantial way. I’m in love and longing to know this place deeply. To gather my roots about myself, roots that trail across half the country and from there across oceans and continents, and plant them, and nurture them here.
In the late twentieth century, a flush of research concerned itself with the kind of belonging I aspire to now. Scientists called this sense of belonging place attachment. Conceptually, place attachment exists across a spectrum that spans everything from the superficial delight a tourist might feel for an aesthetically pleasing but ultimately foreign landscape, to the kind of deep attachment, or rootedness, that comes from the continuity of cultures living in place for many generations over hundreds and thousands of years and the accumulation of knowledge and degree of intimacy with the land this kind of continuity affords. Being an endeavor of Western science, researchers have quantified rootedness: here, relatively brief human timescales begin to converse with deeper time—they say it takes eight generations for this quality of belonging to develop.
The subject renders the scientific language used to describe it poetic. Rootedness is a kind of blurring, a belonging so complete that it becomes hard to draw a line between self and environment. The hallmarks of rootedness are a spiritual connection to place, one that informs and comprises one’s entire experience of life. Religions too have holy places, often in the form of discrete buildings. But for the rooted, the entire landscape becomes sacred, every step a prayer.
A pang shot through me upon learning about place attachment. Rootedness is a birthright of indigeneity. I will never be rooted. But I had to wonder—if place attachment exists on a spectrum, as I learned, what of belonging elsewhere on that spectrum? Can I move myself in the direction of belonging in the way I ache for? Belong is a verb, so how do I do it? I can’t make up for all the time I haven’t been here, and all the time no one in my lineage has been here, but might intention, the other ingredient necessary for a strong sense of place attachment, be a catalyst for a depth of connection otherwise temporally out of reach?
I’ve held these questions and carried them with me on trails through the woods and into the mountains for some years now, every step a prayer. I offer them to the landscape, a love song to the Salish Sea, the shining island on which I live, the Olympic and Cascade ranges that rise around me on all sides. I’ve carefully gathered my trailing roots, transplanted and transplanted and transplanted, and planted them once again, and finally, so they might continue their journey in a different dimension—not across and over, but down and into the earth, understanding that at best I can hope for a mere seventy years in this place. Their tips, in deep time scales, have rested on the soil’s surface just moments, but I feel them searching, looking for purchase in the dense ground.
What sense of belonging might intention yield? A significant one, I’m learning. And not only a sense of belonging, it turns out, but one of hope, too. Our places the world over are beleaguered to the point of ecological collapse just as it seems we’re collectively waking up to the reality of our shared fate with all of life. The ecological despair we all carry as a result, whether consciously or not, finds expression in our bodies and our psyches and by extension our societies. But time plus intention in place develops place attachment, and place attachment changes us.
“One of place attachment’s key behavioral outcomes is stewardship,” writes Professors Scannell and Gifford, authors of the textbook Environmental Psychology. “People who have a strong environmental identity and define themselves as part of nature are more likely to report engaging in pro-environmental behavior.” Despite the dry language, herein lies the promise of actively belonging ourselves to place—that a sense of place attachment will engender acts of nurturing the land and the community of life, ourselves included, that it sustains. We play the leading role in the ecological decline gaining momentum across the earth, and so we have an obligation to even greater impact in roles of ecological regeneration. Place attachment is a doorway in.
How can I make myself into a fiber and offer myself to the weft of this place, woven and felted and in the end no longer able to describe myself without first referencing the place in which I’m held? This is my exploration here. Here on the page and here where I live in deep gratitude on an island in the Salish Sea, where the Suquamish and Duwamish peoples have been rooted for many generations and centuries, caring for and being cared for by this place.
