Journal, 4.8: A Place To Belong

... and pondering the path of my own feet / by Stuart Elliott

By Stuart Elliott

I’ve had a few thoughts rattling around for a while and they are finally starting to converge. Sometimes if I let my thoughts float for long enough they can bump into each other, coalesce and drop into to my awareness as something kind of cohesive. This pouring out of ideas was precipitated by a few separate things.

First,  I was thinking about an old Wendell Berry essay I read a long time ago. The essay, “A Native Hill, from “The Art of the Commonplace,” brings out themes of place, home, and a sense of belonging. The impression that Berry’s ideas left on me in that essay has never lost its mark.

Then, there was a conversation I had with my pastor where he posed a question which basically went like this “Does city life and rural life each have their own distinct impact on the soul or the imagination of its inhabitants?” City dwellers, he mused, seemed less tethered to faith, while rural communities often held a deep well of religious belief. It made me wonder – is there a reciprocity at play? Does the soul of a place seep into its inhabitants, and vice versa?