Kinship, the Powers of Place, and Leavetaking by Sara Wright

What do I mean by the word kinship? I believe that kinship is the idea, and the belief that all aspects of nature from photons to galaxies are connected to one another. Practically, I think of kinship as my feeling/sense of being intimately linked to place/landscape. In my mind Kinship and Place are not only related, each is shaped by the other.

The powers of place are invisible threads that work by exerting a kind of physical and psychic pressure, pulling me into relationship. Place acts like an attractor site. My body behaves like a lightening rod or perhaps a tuning fork picking up information from the landscape. Once I have heard the “call” the door opens through my relationship with elements, trees, animals, stars or stones to name a few possibilities.

As this presence manifests through its individuals place begins to teach me what I need to know about an area and how I might best live in harmony with a particular landscape, if not its people. This learning occurs in bursts or very slowly just below the threshold of everyday consciousness. Either way, information seeps in through my body as I listen and pay close attention to what my senses are telling me. I allow animals, trees, plants to speak to me in their native language, and I note synchronistic occurrences. Information also comes to me through dreams. Eventually a discernable pattern emerges. My body acts as the bridge between self and the rest of Nature; the vehicle that keeps me connected to the whole.

Ironically, I never heard the phrase “power of place” used until the 90’s. Yet, this force has driven my entire life. As a toddler I was already “reading” and absorbing landscapes through rain, flowers, the presence of deer, stars, dogs, the moon. This first intimate relationship with place occurred on my grandparents’ pre -revolutionary farm with its attendant fields, brook, and forest. During the day my little brother and I spent hours in the woods playing by the brook, watching birds, catching frogs and salamanders. At night we learned the names of the stars and caught fireflies which we kept overnight in jars… My grandmother often awakened me to watch the deer grazing under her golden apple tree. I also have a sharp memory of my mother and I gazing out my bedroom window at the full moon. When clouds scudded by shrouding the moon I apparently remarked, “the moon has gone under her covers.”

As an adolescent power of place fatally snagged me with Monhegan Island, an artist’s paradise located off the coast of Maine with it’s beautiful cliffs and raging seas; I moved there after college, married a fisherman, and my two sons were born during those years (I use the word “fatally” deliberately because accompanying the call is a sense of being pulled into the “right” place for unknown reasons. To live one’s Fate is another way to express this calling).

On Southport, another island, 300 year – old apple trees cried out to me, and a diminutive 1700’s cape style house embraced my children and me after my divorce.

After my children were grown, I heard the sound of “wilderness” keening and I moved to the western mountains of Maine seeking the source of that call, the one I called the Mountain Mother. I did not understand then that I was being called to witness the desecration of the earth from ‘my land’ and then to become Nature’s advocate. I was called to this patch of earth to begin my most important life’s – work: to write honestly about my experiences in nature with the hope that I might be able to sensitize others to the destruction of the earth through stories about individuals and my relationship with them. When I first arrived here this mother swept me off my feet! She flowed through me like a great underground river, rooting me to this particular ground, with a love so powerful I had no words to express what I felt. When she continued to communicate with me, I experienced ecstasy, and later during longer and longer silences I felt profound overwhelming grief.

My initial experience with place follows a certain pattern: first I feel joy and wonder, followed by a visceral feeling of belonging, the best kind of natural high. After a time the joyful aspect continues intermittently, as I become more deeply enmeshed in a landscape through relationships with its particular features and creatures as I have with this brook, forest and field, the birds and animals that live here with me… Experiencing joy also opens me to sorrow For example, moving to the mountains of western Maine brought the mindless destruction of trees to the center of my attention. To love is to experience loss of the beloved; the two are intimately related.

In recent years although I continue to experience and write, joy has absented herself from my relationship with this land… There are many reasons I could give and all involve change. The massive tree destruction, noise, gunning, chaotic neighbors etc. are concrete examples of negative changes that have profoundly impacted me. I still experience deep pleasure in particulars like the unfurling leaves of ferns, the first mayflowers, my love of birds, the few bears that continue to visit now and then, my wild gardens on fire with bee balm, delft blue delphinium, and fragrant yellow lilies, the changing seasons but I feel a deep penetrating sadness overall, though I retain a deep love for the land as a whole and my small log cabin. I fervently hope but do not feel that the powers of this place understand that it is time to make a very difficult change.

Who will care for this land when I am gone?

I am eighty years old and no longer able to shovel snow or care for my home. It is impossible to find help, and last winter I damaged my other hip (broke one 2 plus years ago).

Ironically the destructions of the trees and whole forests etc. mirrors what is happening in my life. I must face it. I came to mountains to find forested peace and wilderness and those realities are gone.

I spent a few years in the desert hoping to find ‘home’ there but returned because my bones ached for home. I belong to the North Country both mountain and sea, and was forced to honor this reality knowing that it put me back in the same untenable situation. No help. and no support system beyond the Grace of Nature.

 At present I am in the process of applying for low-income housing closer to the coast to escape the six months of icy winter white that make living here so dangerous. Should I be able to find a place to live – and this is a huge if – I will then be faced by the necessity of selling this house and land.

What propels me to continue is pure necessity, isolation, and the lack of any support system. To leave here and return to a coastal community also completes a circle I began as a young adult. So perhaps I am being called again?

However, I am also facing the reality of abandoning a beloved sanctuary that has been my home.

Catapulted into the unknown I spend every single day feeling as if I am walking on clouds without one visible stepping stone to anchor me to lost ground.

Last winter when my little dog almost died from congestive heart failure, I dreamed that Sedna, the Inuit Seal Goddess, Protectoress of all Animals, appeared on dry land. Her Presence was deeply comforting. I knew then that Hope would always be cared for by this mother of the animals who lived in the sea when her time came.

I am wondering now if Sedna also appeared to remind me that I had to return to the sea?

Postscript: The photo of my mountain (above) is important because it shows that the pines are gone being replaced by struggling saplings that turn green in the summer covering the damage. What you cannot see here is that most of the strip logging has destroyed the possibility of any new growth. Huge areas of bare ground abound though I chose not to show them – too depressing. In Western Maine the strip logging has been so extreme that we are no longer storing carbon because pitiful saplings cannot do the job of photosynthesizing. What this means practically is that our air is disintegrating – and this we cannot blame on trump – we have been at it for years. What is happening here is happening throughout this continent .We desperately need to become aware of what’s happening because breathing is a necessity for all.