Biophilia & A recipe for finding home
Hello from the desert - I'm on a different continent!
Hello from the Sonoran Desert! Pumpkin and I are currently stateside!
While I cannot recommend flying internationally with a baby, it’s wonderful to be back though I wasn’t expecting the wave of emotion and introspection it has provoked.
Lately, I’m asking myself: What makes a place home?
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Arizona is not my home, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and have spent most of my life between Washington, Montana, and California but I do love visiting the Southwest for a topographical and cultural change of scenery from the dense, humid, verdant flat that is my corner of Germany. Like many wild places that have found a home in my heart, the desert is a special place of replenishing powers, like a sunshine-infused tonic for the soul.
Having spent my 20s in 6 different states and living the last few years as an expat, I’ve often pondered
What’s the best place to live? …What is my natural habitat?
But the questions seem ever more pressing now that I am also considering how my son’s childhood will be influenced by location.
The desert is an odd and beautiful place of contrasts.
Hot days and frozen nights; rough and smooth outlines; baren flats and teeming oases; muted and also colorful. A view stretching miles with only sparse signs of life, it seems to display what is often hidden while concealing secrets of its own. Layers of rock formed thousands of years ago lay exposed to the wind and sun while the creatures here hide in plain sight. The plants are barbed masters of self-preservation while generously offering decorative jewel toned blooms, food, and shelter for the birds.
It’s easy as a person from a green place to see shades of tan, a parched endless scape without trees and think this land is lifeless. Squinting as the sun beats down on rock, scrubby (dead?) bush, and cactus, the hot exposure can feel like a threat. But, with a dab of reverence and a teaspoon of curiousity, it grows on you.
At night, a blanket of stars spans as far as one can see. The screech of a great horned owl, mysterious calls, and coyote yips add a strange melody to the breeze whirring through the mesquite. In the morning, the sun pierces the shadowy unknowns of the night, beckoning me to come out.
Is this where I should live?
I never tire of the scent of warm corn tortillas, the territorial chirp of hummingbirds, and the warmth of the locals here but, is that enough to make it home? I feel like a fledgling trying to choose a tree in the forest to call my own and build a nest. But the forest is so vast and each tree so unique, it’s impossible to decide.
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion... Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter…Someplace where we can be free. - Starhawk
I’ve always been a water lover; a semiaquatic creature fixed in a disappointingly featherless, flipperless frame. Childhood summers spent in the wild streams of national forests pretending to be a platypus or waterskiing the morning glass of the Columbia River would form the solid core of my aquaphilia. My parents used to tease that I had been found as a babe at the waters edge and every fiber of my being still wants to believe it. And yet, here I sit, amongst dusty rocks and cactus, gazing out at the desert, eyes round with wonder.
Biophilia is the human desire to connect with nature. It is how a water-lover can be happy amongst the cacti. It’s why picking ripe berries, swimming in a waterfall, or watching ants at work captivates us. I believe it exists within all of us; a pre-installed need to play in mud, smell flowers, top mountains, and delight in creatures great and small.
It’s an odd notion that nowadays we must consciously seek exposure to nature, when not long ago we were still living among the plants and creatures, both confronted with and nourished by the elements. Perhaps we have forgotten that the sun is a healer, that the plants are alchemists and that animals can be among our greatest teachers.
In a lovely memoir tracing the human bond with outdoor spaces and her own experience of moving across the world to make a new home, Marchelle Farrell beautifully describes how she literally put down roots in her garden in order to feel rooted herself. Artfully divided into sections by season and flora, Uprooting, had me at viburnum and I’m eager to get back to Germany and get started in the garden. Thanks to
I actually have an idea of how to proceed this year!Connecting with nature has always been a way for me to feel a sense of belonging to my surroundings. Whether in the garden, gazing into a tide pool, or sleeping under the desert sky, time spent in wild spaces and among plants and animals have grounded me wherever I happened to find myself in the world.
Still, is there such a thing as a perfect place?
The harder I press for ‘the answer’ the more I realise that there isn’t just one.
I don’t believe there is just one ideal place for each of us to know and love as home, just as I don’t believe in only one true love. What I do know to be true is that perspective helps one to define what is most important in life. It’s been a hard-won lesson in my life but I’ve learnt it is possible to bloom where I am planted. A location which offers a true sense of community (something I recently wrote about) and access to sunshine and wild places is all I really need to put down fulfilled roots.
Part of the gift of being human and not a cactus or a platypus is that whether in the desert or the forest, up in mountains or by the sea, one can settle and adapt to just about anywhere we choose to call home. Whether one can be truly content there is another matter and, I believe largely depends on how we choose to interpret our life experiences… one man’s trash, another man’s treasure.
I love this tune by BlackHawk talking about our unique perspectives… Hopefully the song is more treasure than trash to you 😉
While our surroundings do influence our happiness, when it really boils down to it, we can be happy just about anywhere because much of cultivating happiness is in the forming of connections to the living things around us.
Reading the thoughtfully written and well-researched book, This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live felt like a warm hug from a wise friend and I recommend it to anyone who is contemplating relocation or just feeling unsatisfied with “home” currently. The author, Melody Warnick, inspires us with prose and science to be a part of the community and to understand the subtle magic of attachment to our environment. It was a welcome reminder to stay in a positive, curious mindset instead of swimming the current of worries and unknowns of uprooting.
The recipe to start making a place home: Measure out a few of your regular activities and routines and gently mix with those of the community. Sprinkle in participation or volunteer work in areas of your own interest that give you a reason or opportunity to connect with likeminded folks. Add sunshine, time outdoors, random acts of kindness and connection, and bake for several weeks.
*Spoiler alert*: Planting new roots require some grit. You have to stay openminded, be willing to talk to people, and occasionally try new things. Sometimes we have to adjust our internal lens of the world to make the best of what is presented on the outside and, with fresh eyes, we may just find that we actually love what we already have.
One of my favorite books of all time, The Alchemist, which I am re-reading with renewed delight thanks to
, wonderfully animates the value of both the journey and also the homecoming. The young Santiago goes onma vision quest - an adventure taking him from his home in Andalusia, to Morocco, through the Sahara Desert and Egypt, only to return and find the treasure buried near his home. The true treasure is, of course, not the gold he unearths from under the sycamore tree, but his adventure, exposure to other worlds, the love he finds, and life lessons he gathers along the way.Question: Where is the best place to live?
Answer: Right here, right now
If you’re needing more practical guidance on how to enjoy being right here, right now, check out my articles on slow living as well as this one where I share my own journey with changing my lifestyle.
If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to know:
Where is your natural habitat and, how do you connect?
As always, thanks for reading. Please consider supporting my work by sharing it with a friend 💖
xx Chesica
I was born near a coast, which my visits to feel like an alignment, each and every time. For a long time, I knew only the wet, gray, sand of the tormented Atlantic but later met estuaries, rivers, the pebbled Pacific, glacial lakes, and the beloved white sands of the Gulf.
I love rugged and rolling mountains alike, wide open plains marked by fields of wheat or dusted tunnels with prairie dog heads poking out, and some of the greatest peace I’ve ever known waited for me under a starry sky at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Still, I crave the energy of a certain cities… one with miles of concrete and steel, water towers, and skyscrapers under an endless blue and others I’ve never been to but dream of across the sea.
For a long time, it was hard to come home leaving all of these places — as I’d not yet found home within myself and believed I’d needed those altered locales to feel something… alive? awake? joyful?
I’m grateful it’s not that way anymore.
Stunning colors here, Chesica- Thanks for sharing.