Place

Posted: September 4, 2026 | Author: David | Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness, Permaculture & Home Renovation |1 Comment

“Place is the first of all beings, since everything that exists is in a place and cannot exist without a place,” Archytas observed, a Pythagorean mathematician, as recorded by Simplicius, the Neoplatonist.  As a Pythagorean, he saw the kinship of all beings, a fundamental spiritual connection shared by humans and animals.  

Niels Bohr, the pioneering Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, then won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, stood at Kronberg Castle in Denmark, in 1924 and, with a colleague, mused on place:

Isn’t it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here?  As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together.  The stone, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle.  None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely.  Suddenly the walls and ramparts speak a different language.  The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness of the human soul, we hear Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.”  Yet, all we really know is that his name appears in a 13th century chronicle.  No one can prove he really lived here.  But everyone knows the question Shakespeare had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so he too had to be found in a place on earth, here in the Kronberg.  And once we know that, Kronberg becomes quite a different castle for us.

To an American, this is a striking insight.  To the Western Apache, it goes without saying. 

Keith Basso was a cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose career was spent with the Western Apache, specifically the community of Cibecue, Arizona learning their reverence for place.  He explains, that to the Apaches of Cibecue, “the past is a well-worn ‘path’ or ‘trail’ which was traveled first by the people’s founding ancestors and which subsequent generations of Apaches have traveled ever since.”  Over time this path is no longer visible.  The past has disappeared, and so it must be reconstructed through place-names, stories, and songs.  

The place names, markers of culture, use specific identifiers to preserve not only the words of the ancestors, but graphic impressions: “Two Old Women Are Buried” (a hill); “Lizards Dart Away In Front (the eastern face of a mountain); “She Became Old Sitting” (a cornfield); “She Carries Her Brother On Her Back” (a steep slope).

The names offer evidence of change over time, shifts in climatic patterns, even change in the face of a geologic constant – all finding expression in the Apache place-world.  Their names carry resonant cultural meaning.  Life has meaning because it is rooted in place.  

American exceptionalism knows nothing of such grounded sense of place.  

The “Big Apple” is named not because of an old orchard but the big prize money at race tracks in and around the former Dutch colony.  Thoroughbreds bridled and broken to race for the prize, to earn riches for the owners.  “West,” a town in Texas, is in the north/central region of that state, named for its original Postmaster.  “Poland” was a favorite song of the first settler of that town in central Maine, while “Rocky Mountain” North Carolina lies 1,800 miles east of the Rocky Mountains, 400 miles east of the Smoky Mountains, on the fall line between the foot hills of the Piedmont and the low flat coastal plain.  

Our culture lives upon, but not with, the land.  

Land is our commodity, a contract to be bought, sold and fought over; divided for its spoils, left then on its own.  Manifest Destiny was our clarion call, ordained by God, of which the self-certain settlers reassured themselves as they staked their claims.  

The Atlantic coast became crowded, gold discovered in Georgia, so five highly civilized cultures were forced to walk west, under US Military escort, on the Trail of Tears.  The vast lands beyond the Appalachians beckoned Anglo immigrants, who flooded west to stake their claims.  

Wagon trails became paved highways, and the great American road trip was born, the right of everyman to go-go-go on a quest for spiritual freedom, rejection of post-war conformity.  “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars,” wrote Kerouac, but racing at 70 miles per hour in search of everywhere is to know nothing of anywhere: no place, and no poetry.  

Eventually that immense physical space became filled.  Within our lifetime another frontier emerged – the internet – and now data centers consume place and power to drive AI’s limitless consumption of energy.  Soon some will begin to colonize Mars, our insatiable need to dominate and take, onward, to “go where no man has gone before.”

The Wendat (Huron) or Iroquoian word Ontarí’io or oniatarí:io, which translates to “great lake”, “beautiful lake”, or “lake of shining waters” has been arbitrarily renamed in honor of an explorer and navigator from Florence, Italy.  

A capricious act, how unserious we are.  

And this was done not by the will of we the people, but unilaterally by one man’s ipse dixit command. 

An uproar ensues.  Maps will be changed, at considerable cost, while others promise to defy the name change.  But a political fight seems impotent, just two sides of the same coin: place as object.  

To our ongoing detriment we ignore our own relationship, and our ancestors’ relationship, to the earth that nurtures and supports us.  How little we know, and how much less we understand, about place: the kinship of all beings, a fundamental spiritual connection shared by humans and animals.  “Place is the first of all beings….”  

Such has been the daily news, as eighth grade resumes and my son and I prepare to dig in the dirt.  

The applied soil science class shall resume as a meditation upon place, the biology, chemistry and geology that under pins “the darkness of the human soul” which can open, through understanding, to the light.  For history, we can study Manifest Destiny as collective myth, the guiding story of American civilization.  

We will approach place with a renewed vigor, as a counter balance to the mindless news of the day, the aggressive taking, names that mean nothing but ego. 

We will dig in the dirt.  

And perhaps, in doing so, learn again where we are.

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