Spirituality of Place: Belonging to the Land

Some lessons arrive before we know we need them. In reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I was reminded of how much I had learned about land and nature before I realized (years later) what I was learning.

I was about ten years old the first time my great-aunt walked me through the land that would one day become my home, though I had no way of knowing that then. I was simply a child following my much-loved relative through the woods, listening to her soft voice. She stopped at a sassafras tree and pressed her fingers to the bark, explaining that you could make tea from it. We walked the creek together, and she taught me to read the seasons. Different animals appeared at different times of year, plants came and went with the seasons, and the water itself seemed to change its path depending on how much rain had fallen. I didn’t have words for what she was doing at the time. Now I understand that she was initiating me into a place, teaching me its language before I even knew it was a language worth learning. Years later, I live here. And I am still learning what she began to teach me all those years ago.

My great-aunt was not a philosopher or a theologian. She was simply a woman who knew her land, and in knowing it, she gave me something I didn’t fully recognize as a gift until much later. What she was doing on those walks was teaching me that a place has a vocabulary, and that learning it is an act of relationship rather than mere observation. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer writes about this kind of knowing – the difference between seeing land as something you occupy and experiencing it as something you are in relationship with. My great-aunt embodied that distinction without ever naming it. When she showed me the sassafras tree, she wasn’t delivering a botany lesson. She was introducing me to a way of living – sustenance in times of need. When we watched the animals that came and went along the creek bank with the turning of the seasons, she was teaching me to pay attention. And attention, I have come to believe, is one of the most fundamental forms of reverence available to those of us who find the sacred not above the world, but woven into it. She was teaching me, in the most natural way possible, how to belong to a place.

There is a profound difference between visiting a place and inhabiting it. As a child, I was a guest here. Welcomed, shown around, and handed a set of keys I wouldn’t know how to use for decades. But my whole life I longed to be here, always. I felt that I belonged here more than anywhere else I had lived during my life. Living here now, I find myself returning to what my great-aunt planted in me, often without realizing it is happening. I notice when the first cold front shifts the quality of light through the pines. I watch the creek after a hard rain and how the land may completely change its shape. I have learned which edges of the property hold their shape longest, where the deer move through at dusk, which native plants the pollinators visit year after year as if staking a quiet claim. None of this happened all at once. Belonging to a place, I’ve come to understand, is not a destination but a slow accumulation. Built season by season, year by year, through the simple discipline of showing up and paying attention. My great-aunt gave me the eyes for this long before I had the life experience to use them. What felt like a childhood walk along a creek was, in fact, an inheritance.

For those of us who practice spiritual naturalism, place offers something that abstract philosophy alone cannot – an anchor. The land itself becomes the ground of our spiritual life, quite literally. The creek, the sassafras, the deer at dusk, the pollinators working the same plants in the same spots season after season – these are not symbols pointing toward something more real. They are the real thing. Kimmerer speaks of the animacy of the natural world, the idea that we are surrounded by lives and intelligences that predate us and will outlast us, and that our task is simply to become humble enough to notice. This is where spiritual practice and sense of place converge for the naturalist: in the discipline of attention, repeated over time, in a specific patch of earth. My great-aunt never used the word spiritual. She didn’t need to. She already understood that knowing the name of a tree, knowing what it offers and what it needs, knowing when the animals come and go along a particular stretch of creek — this is not separate from a life of meaning. It is the substance of one.

I still walk the creek. The sassafras tree my great-aunt showed me all those years ago is no longer standing, but I walk the same path remembering her voice, feeling the particular quality of this place settle around me like something I have always worn. She has passed, too, but what she gave me lives on in the way I move through this land — slowly, attentively, with a growing sense that I am not merely on it, but of it. This, I think, is what belonging to a place feels like from the inside: not a dramatic revelation, but a quiet accumulation of mornings and seasons and small noticings that add up, over time, to something that resembles wholeness. For those of us who seek the sacred in the natural world, we need not look far. We need only look around. At the ground beneath our feet, at the particular patch of earth that has called to us, or that we have slowly learned to call home. The land is always speaking. My great-aunt taught me that. I am still learning to listen.

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Reference:

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.