The Ecotone wiki, a collaborative project by bloggers who write about place, gets it’s official launch this week with a collection of essays about how we all came to write about place.
My contribution, from my Bowen Island Journal, is about how I began to see the world through the eyes of an exile while I was living in England as a kid. Others at the Ecotone wiki seem to also be drawing on both their childhood experiences and experiences of moving, and being dislocated as some point in their lives. I think it is this dislocation that gives us the lens through which we come to see the place in which we live.
Fred First in Floyd County, Virginia, USA puts some legs on this idea, and its implications, in his post:
When we write about place we explore particular coordinates of geography and landform and private experience, guided by our own life maps, seen through lenses that can bind me to your world across the globe’s wide curve. And doing so connects us person to person, territory to territory, pulling real places from the representational map that is the internet. Can this writing about place bring us into each other’s world, build community? I trust we will see.
I write about place to invite strangers to know and understand my world, perhaps to see their world differently having come here, with new and useful landmarks on their maps when they leave. So perhaps I write, too, as a an open page of hospitality, a way of saying “my house is your house, and my creek and valley, likewise”. Maybe I think and write about place because, as I believe Wendell Berry has suggested, if you don’t know where you’re from, you won’t know where you’re going. In some small or great way, it may be possible in writing on this topic to help each other know where we’re going by better understanding the places from which we have come.
We will be writing once every two weeks on a different topic. Feel free to join us.
The odds of any one person in the blogoshpere sharing your brithday is…well…pretty good. Happy birthday Jordan.
Happy Birthday to me!
I was born 35 years ago today. This what else was happening that late spring day in 1968:
- Picasso paints the above picture
- Young soldier in Vietnam wrote home about losing his camera
- Nine people were killed by a tornado in Tracy, Minnesota
- A Day of Awareness, Day of Hope is held in Atlanta to combat poverty
- A helicopter crew dies in Vietnam when they collide with another plane
- Phelim O’Neil is expelled from the Orange Order in Belfast for attending a Catholic service
- The BeeGees record Indian Gin and Whiskey Dry
- The Shah of Iran speaks at Harvard University on the challenges of the developing world. He quotes Saadi, Coleridge, Confucius and the Bible
- The tanker World Glory spills 14.2 million gallons of oil in the Indian Ociean, 105 kilometres east of Durban, South Africa.
- A single Red Knot was spotted in the St. Croix River Valley in Minnesota
- Gloucestershire beats Cambridge University by an innings and 69 runs. Green and Shepard have centuries.
- Five days after he is imprisoned, Hussain Ibrahim’s house is blown up by Israeli solders in Ramallah because he is accussed of being a member of Fateh. His wife and sons are left homeless.
- Pope Paul VI gives an Audience during which he warns of the dangers of a lack on faith in an incresingly materialistic world.
I would like to say that having children is one of the greatest acts of faith anyone can commit. So here’s a resounding thank you to my parents for helping me to experience the Precious Human Birth:
Since you have a precious human birth, you should not waste it. If you waste this time, then you are wasting something very great. Even were you to waste a billion dollars, it doesn’t matter. You can make it up. You can do something, and you can make it up. But if you waste this precious human birth, it is very, very difficult. You cannot make it up.
— Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso Rinpoche
Jack Ricchiuto posts some thoughts on happiness to which I responded with some of the following in his comments:
The greatest gift I can give my children is being with them.
Two days ago I spent two hours with my two year old son during which I said nothing. I simply sat on the grass with him, at his eye level and played whatever he wanted to play. I expressed no desires or needs of my own, I imposed no agenda on him. We laughed together and when our wrestling got out of hand and he got hurt I held him on my lap and placed my hand over the ear he mashed when he fell to the ground. He fell asleep on my lap and that is where his day ended. I sang to him and took him inside to bed.
My son offered me the gift of his presence, his joy and happiness and utter abandon of being a child. Children are our most precious dharma teachers.
Stonewall Place closes. What a wonderful documented adventure in the Aleutians that was.