Places

I love the idea of Places.

There are just so very many of them.  Inner Places, outer Places, upper Places, lower Places.  Even those of us who collect Places can never hope to find them all.

You think you know a Place, until you see it from the sky.  And then you think you know the sky, until you’re falling through it.  How the sky feels in an airplane, in a free-fall, in the cushion of a parachute; how the river feels beneath a bridge, beneath a raft, above your head; how a mountain feels, within, without, above, below; there are oh so many Places.  Did you know that every Place has a verticality?

Places swell and shrink.  There are continents, countries, regions, cities, neighbourhoods, domiciles, coordinates; there are worlds, systems, galaxies, universes ever expanding.  There is this one point where I stand right now, and all the others where a billion others stand; and then we move, and the Places change again.

We make the Places, with our feet, our tools, our wars, our treaties.  We call them “ours” or “theirs” or “no man’s”; we name them, package them, trade them, as if they were belongings.  Does a Place really belong to us? Or do we belong to it?

And if we do, then which Place is our own? Which Place owns us? Some are owned by one; some by many. 

Some selves are displaced, seeking Places, fleeing Places.  Some are misplaced.  Belonging to an undefined elsewhere.  Or belonging nowhere, not even in our own cognitive space.  Others seem to find belonging everywhere.  They carry it with them, like a backpack.  They arrive, unzip it, and instantly belong.  Still others drift from Place to Place, belonging only to themselves.

Some people stay in one Place all their lives.  Have they sunk deeper into that Place than those who’ve left? Do they know it in a way that others cannot? Is there an aspect of a Place that is unknowable, except to those who’ve always been there? Or does it take a stranger’s eyes to really see a Place for what it is?

I have this life now where I go Places.  Being in a new Place is, for me, the essence of being alive.  Never do I feel more awake, more full-hearted, more grateful, than when I look around me and see the differentness of one Place and then another.  Every Place has a story.  Every story has a meaning.  Every meaning calls us back to the glory of existence, the gift of awareness, the wonder of spinning through space and time with all the others who have or will accompany us from Place to Place to Place.

This is what traveling does for me.  It takes me out of myself, out of my cloister of selfhood, and draws me out into the free air of movement and choice.  I can move through this world.  It waits for me.  When this Place becomes too familiar, there is always another, and another, and another after that.  Places bring us closer to understanding the magnitude of infinity.  My one Place is so very, very small, and yet it holds so very, very much.  Each breath, each glimpse, changes it again.

Soon I will be going home, and then to the home that was home before that.  The First Places.  In the end, there is no Place like the place where it all began.  But the notion of Places is in me now.  In a sense, I will never be home again.