Belonging: A Culture of Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

making community. To live in close contact with neighbors, to see them every day but to never engage in fellowship was downright depressing. People I knew in the city often ridiculed the idea that one would want to live in community — what they loved about the city was the intense anonymity, not knowing and not being accountable. At times I did feel a sense of community in the city and endeavored to live in the West Village as though it was a small town. Bringing my Kentucky ways with me wherever I made homeplace sustained my ties to home and also made it possible for me to return home.
    My decision to make my home in Kentucky did not emerge from any sentimental assumption that I would find an uncorrupted world in my native place. Rather I knew I would find there living remnants of all that was wonderful in the world of my growing up. During my time away, I would return to Kentucky and feel again a sense of belonging that I never felt elsewhere, experiencing unbroken ties to the land, to homefolk, to our vernacular speech. Even though I had lived for so many years away from my people, I was fortunate that there was a place and homefolk for me to return to, that I was welcomed. Coming back to my native place I embrace with true love the reality that “Kentucky is my fate” — my sublime home.

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Moved by Mountains
    Life is full of peaks and valleys, triumphs and tribulations. We often cause ourselves suffering, by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent. We resist the truth of difference and diversity. We resist acknowledging that our constants exist within a framework where everything is always changing. We resist change. When we are able to face the reality of highs and lows embracing both as necessary for our full development and self-actualization, we can feel that interior well-being that is the foundation of inner peace. That life of appreciation for difference, for diversity, a life wherein one embraces suffering as central to the experience of joy is mirrored for us in our natural environment.
    Earth is a diverse ecosystem. Mountains, hills, valleys, rivers and lakes, the forest are all naturally organically balanced. We have much to learn as inhabitants, as witnesses to this environment. Like the indigenous Native Americans who peopled the Americas before the rest of us, if we listen nature will teach us. However, if we think of the natural landscapes that surround us as simply, blank slates, existing for humans to act upon them according to our will then we cannot exist in life sustaining harmony with the earth. We cannot proudly declare like the biblical psalmist that “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” The psalmist wanted us to know that we can gain spiritual strength by simply beholding the natural world, that indeed to look upon the wonders of nature is to gaze at divine spirit. Estrangement from our natural environment is the cultural contest wherein violence against the earth is accepted and normalized. If we do not see earth as a guide to divine spirit, then we cannot see that the human spirit is violated, diminished when humans violate and destroy the natural environment.
    Nothing epitomizes this violence more in our contemporary life than mountain-top removal (when the summit of the mountain is removed to extract coal) and the devastation that occurs in its wake. In Stephen Georges’s essay, “Bringing Down The Mountain,” he explains the way it all happens: “Mountaintop-removal mining is a simple process, plow the trees (but don’t bother to harvest them) and everything else living on the mountain, blast off the top (usually 800 to 1,000 feet), take out the coal, and leave a leveled area.... “Much of this mining takes place in Appalachia yet it still one of the materially poorest regions in our nature. The wealth that is in our natural world when measured in dollars is not