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Showing posts from November, 2016

Scatterlings: Being claimed by stories

Dartmoor In a time of resurgent nationalism, what does it mean to belong to a place, be claimed by a place? For one thing the currency must be smaller than that of a nation state. It must be, say, a particular clump of trees, nestling as a copse against a ruined castle, dripping with local stories of ghosts or a narrow, winding, stream-filled vale from which an especial eerie raven watches your descent from a granite rock. It must be a place, actually loved, coming to be known, as far as any place can be, as a person listens, attentively, to its stories and allows those stories to begin to rise up and begin their telling in them, through them. For it is only in these ways that you can come to realize that a place is not yours for the taking, assimilating it wholly to your needs, even for healing, but a place that breaks you open, shatters the narrow confines of your present self, and makes you something different, wider, deeper, more alive. More alive precisely bec