I moved the cats, Little, Angelina, Dusty, and Spot, to John’s over Labor Day weekend. I camped out with them the first three nights to help them adjust, then packed up the tent on the fourth night and went home. When I woke up the next morning and opened the door, Little was sitting there like she’d done countless mornings in the past. She had hiked two miles through tall grass right back here. And I thought she liked her new home! She seemed happy enough.

It made me start thinking of the power that place holds again. Energetically, this is home for Little, this is the energy she vibrates with, not the energy two miles up the road. This is the only place that feels right to her. This is where she belongs.

And what exactly is this homing instinct? She knew exactly how to get back here, although she’d never been away from home before. I feel the pull inside of me to get back home too, only I’m not able to act on it. How vital it seems to me to be in your own element. To resonate and be one with the environment around you.

What fascinates me is that no one else seems to sense the importance of this. It’s only in Native American writing that I see mention of the importance of place. In becoming such a mobile society I think we’ve lost so much more than just our connections to family and community, as significant as those things are. There is something of our human potential lost as well. Changes have come so rapidly in the past two-hundred years that few have paused to consider the consequences. Being rootless has dumbed us down, spiritually. We’ve gone superficial, just skimming the surface of life.

 

I sense that the land has a lot to teach us. Nuance has become the word of the year for me. Delving into the power of place we discover nuance. Reality has a depth that is unimaginable, so richly nuanced, so full of unexplored potential.

 

Indigenous people have so often been dismissed for their magical thinking and irrational beliefs. But maybe if we lived fully nuanced lives we would understand indigenous reality. Perhaps there is far more truth there than we could imagine.