A Sense of Place

Nashville is a place to which I feel deeply rooted.  It is the place where I was born and where I spent the majority of my formative years.  I have not lived in Middle Tennessee for more than thirty years, and I have lived in seven other places since then.  Yet to Nashville, I feel a sense of belonging, one that is fundamental to my identity as a person.   It is a place of known earth and known weather, but it is a kind of knowing that involves the senses, and memory and history.  It is a place where things that are important to me happened.  This rootedness in geography is a reference point that guides my inward exploration, a landmark at my core that defines me physically and spiritually.  I feel the same sense of belonging to Nashville that I imagine Robert Frost felt toward Vermont or William Faulkner felt toward Mississippi, or at least the sense of place that they expressed through their writings.  Wallace Stegner argued that “…a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it died in it – have both experienced it and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities…. Whatever their relation to is, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”   

America is a country in perpetual motion where opportunities for mobility abound.  Often, this rootlessness is motivated by a quest for ownership rather than belonging, and it undermines the process of long-term association with any given place.  Our sense of place involves a sense of responsibility.  Without a commitment to place, Americans are content to litter their own streets, ravage their own hillsides, foul their own rivers, and pollute their own air and then move on.  If we truly felt rooted to the land, would we not take better care of it?  We are a country of bandits, raiding and pillaging before riding on to the next town.

My own experience has been typically American.  My family moved from Tennessee, to Texas, to Ohio, to Louisiana, back to Tennessee, then Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New York in response to professional opportunities.  A map of my wanderings depicts a big “X” with the center lying over Nashville -- even my transiency leads back to my roots.  I am not sure why I feel such a kinship with Nashville, but my thoughts often wander back to memories of Middle Tennessee.  To know a place in a real and lasting way is to dream it.