Knowing Home

In writing about "dwelling," the act of fully inhabiting the places called "home", Deborah Tall talks about feelings of alienation:

"When the landscapes in which we find ourselves are not diffused with our meanings, our history or community, it is not easy to attach ourselves to them."

Ignorance of the stories of place is not a benign miss, Tall is arguing, not just one more loss in a world of too many lost opportunities, but detrimental to the soul. For to feel alienated from place is to never quite feel at home.

I agree and want to push her thoughts one step further. To truly know a place, to feel at rest, to know that we are home, we need to know not only the human history of place; we also need to know the natural history of place.

Sadly though, most of us don't. We cannot name the trees around us, or where the owls roost at night; we cannot tell you when the moon will rise or where the sunbeams fall on our floor on the spring equinox. We do not know where our food comes from, where our trash goes, or what grew on this spot before our house was built here.

And so we presume not to care. We imagine that place is immaterial to the full exercise of our spirit, and burrow into our homes and coffee shops and restaurants and dens, watching electronic screens and each other, pretending it makes no difference where we are.

But of course, it does.

One of the most soaring bits of writing about the imprint of place on the human spirit is found in Mark Twain's autobiography, when he recalls his early years at the family farm.

"I can call back the solemn twilight," he writes, "and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage... I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky... I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires... I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted; and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts and the persimmons... I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawns to scramble for them with the pigs..."

He goes on like this for two pages, in 10 point font.

Reading these words we share his delight in this vicarious tour of his childhood places, and sense his ache for a time and place he cannot revisit, and we can never know.

While Twain's enchanted place of memory will always be foreign to us, we need not be bereft of or alienated from our own. What we might have missed in school, in childhood, in a region far away, we can gain in part now. So many places and people and resources are ready now to reconnect us to place.

We are particularly fortunate in Baltimore. Once again, the Natural History Society of Maryland's Community Naturalist Program is offering a rich program - Trees of Neighborhoods, Parks, and Schoolyards - that will help to reconnect us to place, to the natural and physical world we daily inhabit.

Among other goals, this program will offer you the opportunity to:

A. Become familiar with resources available to identify native and cultivated trees.
B. Develop tree identification skills through laboratory and field experiences.
C. Learn technical vocabulary of woody plant description.
D. Become familiar with characteristics of 40 common tree species.

It will also help ground us, root us, in that bit of earth's place that we call home.

Trees of Neighborhoods, Parks, and Schoolyards - Spring 2011 will meet Monday evenings beginning May 9. Come with a partner. Connect with your home, its land, trees and people.

And if you are beyond the Baltimore bounds, find a local nature center near your home to learn more, or if you are a maven [expert] naturalist yourself, gently share your learning and wisdom with your neighbors.

We should not have to live a world where we all know more about varieties of cell phones than the trees that inhabit and sustain our world.