“Wanting desperately to belong to one’s place” – On the virtues of staying put

When the Smithsonian article I posted went online, almost 30 friends posted it on Facebook. It seems that Meghan Daum is not alone in her affection for my hometown. And yet what struck me as I read the comments of my friends linking to the story was how so many of them said “someday I’ll go back.” Like Daum, they’d lived here, loved it… and then left. True, they plan to return, but only after professional goals have been attained.

There’s an inherent danger in writing about the personal decisions of others – especially friends – so I want to tread carefully here. I understand the draw of a dream job doing what you feel you were born to do. I also understand quite well the limitations of Lincoln. It’s a city of 275,000. Even with a relatively urbane crowd – by midwestern standards – on campus and in the downtown area, it’s not like you’re going to run into Christopher Hitchens at a cocktail party or bump into Will Smith at a high-school football game. So I understand the desire to leave and I don’t want to judge others unfairly or too harshly.

That disclaimer aside, I firmly believe that we should reevaluate the standards by which we judge our lives and ought to give place a more privileged position than it presently holds.

In Where Mortals Dwell Craig Bartholomew briefly discusses the costs of places. He cites the case of Wendell Berry as one example of paying a steep price to be part of the land, to be, as Berry memorably has it, “the exhalations” of one’s place. In the mid 1960s Berry and his wife Tanya were enjoying his budding career as an English professor. He had won a fellowship at Stanford University in the late 1950s and was then teaching at a small college in New York City. If there’s a better setup for an aspiring professor, novelist and poet, I don’t know it.

Despite all that, they felt restless. So they decided to return to Kentucky, home to both of their families for the past five generations. There, Berry became a farmer while continuing his work as a writer. From that life has been born some of the greatest poetry and novels in recent American literature. You will not find a more reflective, patient, and tender novel than Jayber Crow. As a poet Berry has developed a plain-spoken sagacity that invites both literary critics and poetry novices into his work. Berry has also developed into one of the nation’s finest essayists as seen in his works The Unsettling of America, Life is a Miracle, and What are People for?

He never attained a PhD or a cushy professorship at an elite creative writing program. (Not that those are bad things in themselves.) But what he has attained is a life well-lived – and there are many PhDs and professors who cannot say as much. In one of his poems he exhorts his readers to not be ashamed when the judgments of others or the forces of consumerism attempt to shame you. Berry has followed his own advice. And in so doing, he’s developed an identity with and in his place.

In describing that identity, Berry writes:

“What I had done caused my mind to be thrown back forcibly upon its sources: my home countryside, my own people and history… It occurred to me that there was another measure for my life than the amount or even the quality of writing I did; a man, I thought, must be judged by how willingly and meaningfully he can be present where he is, by how fully he can make himself at home in his part of the world. I began to want desperately to belong to my place.”

This, of course, begs the question “what is the proper reward of belonging to one’s place?” What would be the result of living 50, 60 or 70 years in a single place with the desire to experience an intimate knowledge of that place?

In a fine essay at The Rabbit Room Jonathan Rogers describes the idea of “thin” places: Places where the barrier between seen and unseen is nearly transparent, where a sense of transcendent awe is most imminent and present. The most obvious places one might think of are the Grand Canyon, the great redwood forests of California or perhaps the Himalayas or Victoria Falls.

But Berry, as Rogers rightly notes, reminds us that any well-cared for place on earth can acquire this thinness, given enough time. In rare cases, thinness is an almost default quality enjoyed by the land – such as the aforementioned Grand Canyon. But any well-cared-for piece of land is thin – its just a different sort of thinness. Sometimes a place’s transcendence doesn’t announce itself. Becoming aware of it is a process, sometimes a rather long one. Berry moved back to Kentucky in order to discover that thinness in Kentucky and nourish an awareness of it in his and Tanya’s hearts. Joie and I came back to Nebraska for something like the same reason – but I doubt we would’ve done it without Berry’s gentle prodding. That is his gift to us.

Recently Front Porch Republic announced a new series called The View from Your Front Porch. In it, they invite readers to take a snapshot of the immediate view from their front porch, write a brief reflection on it and submit that to FPR. I thought of participating but felt a certain embarrassment about my particular front porch. Like much of Nebraska, it’s beauty must be waited for. It doesn’t announce itself. There’s a public school with a bland brick facade directly across from us and most of the homes on either side aren’t well maintained by their owners. When I thought of that view and compared it to the sort of idyllic small-town rural vistas I imagined FPR readings enjoying, my own place seemed tawdry, dirty, and oh-so-modern in comparison.

But the more I sit on my porch the more I feel secure about my place. There’s a certain loveliness to it – especially in the fall. The trees here are old and in their autumn colors they have a kind of aged splendor about them, the beauty of a wizened old woman dressed her best. And while it’s true that the houses could be cleaned up a bit, there’s a certain charm to their obviously lived-in appearance. These houses aren’t built to impress, aren’t intended primarily for the owners’ to put on airs or flaunt their wealth and accomplishments. They’re places where people live. And they look it. In a way, that waited-on beauty and lack of pretension might sum up my home state better than anything else I know.

As I said earlier, this isn’t to say that everyone ought to stay in their hometown forever. It is to say, however, that there’s a certain kind of unique joy in discovering, as Ted Kooser dubs them, the “local wonders” of one’s place. In pursuing the satisfaction of career fulfillment its possible – and I’d even say highly probable – that we’ve left behind the older, deeper pleasures of satisfaction in one’s home.

Further, in leaving behind that older pleasure we’ve also lost the ways that rootedness shapes us as human beings. These are not small things to sacrifice. And when one considers the staggering cost – financially, relationally, and ecologically – of a career-driven life (or more properly, of millions of career driven lives) surely that must at least force us to pause and consider our choices. Upon that consideration, some of us will still leave… and that’s OK. But, I hope, a good many of us will choose to stay so that we too may learn to belong to our place.