Gratitude for a Sense of Place
It took me a while to make the decision to leave the Blue Ridge Mountains but when I did my compass pointed south, or specifically– southwest. The live oak trees draped with Spanish moss whisper my name as the wind rattles their waxy, hard leaves against each other. The smell of coastal Alabama soil, that sandy loam, lies waiting for me to come home, to walk barefoot and connected with its magnificence.
In the past 18 months I made over ten trips to my home to document the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and with each trip, it was more difficult to leave. I felt my work was just scratching the surface, that there is so much more I could do, that I wanted the Gulf of Mexico to raise up through me to protect Herself. All of these reasons resound in my mind but more important than anything is an intense desire, a burning within my soul, to be home. I can’t really explain it, although my mind has tried to make sense of it. It feels like my bones responding to a homing signal. Maybe I’m experiencing the same pull that monarch butterflies feel or migratory birds. It’s like an internal signal has been activated and I’m ready to go.
Meanwhile, amid this magnetic pull back to the Alabama Gulf Coast, I have my home for sale and am dealing with flaky buyers who change their minds like they were changing their dinner order. Dealing with the ups and downs of selling my beautiful home is wearing on me. But my vision is still crystal clear; I won’t allow insensitive buyers to detract me from my intention.
I love the land here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The nearby Smoky Mountains are a true spiritual home for me and have been since I was a child. Living here has been healing and restorative and has boosted my creativity and connected me with incredible people. All to prepare me to return back to my home and apply everything I’ve learned here to help an area that was heavily damaged with the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. And no matter what the slick BP advertisements and tourist boards say, there is still substantial problems in areas along the coast and a looming unknown regarding wildlife and Gulf health. I want to be there to do whatever I can to help this place recover.
And still….still…beyond the reasons I think I’m headed home, I really don’t know what I will be doing help the communities or wildlife. And that doesn’t matter really because I’m taking the first step and that is to be willing to sell my mountain home and move back to the place where I was born in total trust that I will be shown what to do when I am there. I am willing to take this leap.
When I was walking this morning in the frosty, mountain air I realized that the biggest surprise of everything going on in my life now is this intense love I have for the Gulf of Mexico, the shores, bays, rivers and people. My bones resonate with the tides there and for this deep sense of place, I am truly grateful. I never realized how powerful the love of a place could be and how being totally committed to helping protect it can change the course of a life.
Excerpt from my book Sharks On My Fin Tips: A Wild Woman’s Adventures with Nature–“Like many coastal species that begin life in the brown waters of Weeks Bay, I began my life on the shores of this tiny estuary. I grew up amid herons, egrets, baby crabs, shrimp and mullet with the dark-brown mud squishing between my young toes. The smell of salt marsh filled my being and was imprinted on my soul only hours after I breathed my first breath….And like the creatures birthed in the bay, I too moved away from its tranquil shores yet I will always feel the pulsation of saltwater in my blood like a magnet, drawing me home.”
Where do you find a sense of place? What place calls to your bones?
One Reply to “Gratitude for a Sense of Place”
Greetings, just found via Southeast Green, where my blog was recently added. The term “sense of place” always grabs my attention, since first seeing it about a decade ago before I began writing, knowing that this was something my future writing would explore. My migration has been from the deep south to the Blue Ridge, as has my wife’s, who grew up in Biloxi. Part of us is still festooned with Spanish Moss, and that will always be home for a bit of our hearts. But we are “loving the one we’re with” in southwest Virginia–a place towards which we have, all our lives, been migrating–like salmon following the scent back up the streams where they were born, seeking out a nutrient they cannot live without.