A Sense of Place

I do better in life when I can step back and see from a wider perspective. When I was suffering from the isolation of this pandemic, it helped to think about cultures and peoples down through the ages that suffered similar situations, and yet life went on for enough of the population that civilization continued. I also stepped back in my mind when the extreme cold of this past winter seemed to go on and on..... Even though it felt like it would never end, I could think more widely and know that spring eventually does come. I've noticed a primal worry in myself each late winter when I wonder if this is the year that spring won't show up. I imagine that kind of fear is what triggered many closer-to-the-land cultures in the past who practiced rituals to help bring in the turning of the season.

 A similar stepping back has happened to me these past weeks regarding the land we live on here at Prairie Hill. Now that the snow has finally melted from my garden spaces, I've been looking for new growth coming up, and being extra aware of conditions like sun, temperature, wind and rain. I am thinking more about climate and growing conditions for plants and for us humans. And when I stepped back from those thoughts, it made me curious about the deep history of our acreage here, curious enough to check out many books from the library and look on various websites. It has been an adventure!

Our home here consists of 7.89 acres of formerly undeveloped land. Roughly 4 acres are at the top of a hill, from where you can see far views of the city and countryside. The other 4 acres along the hillside and at the bottom are where we have built our homes and the common house. We truly value this piece of land, and we have put in many guidelines that make sure we care well for it. We try to practice permaculture principals which include honoring the processes that nature has already put into practice here, carefully studying the effects of what we might build or implement beforehand, refraining from using chemicals and poisons on the land, replenishing the soil when we harvest things from it. But our familiarity with this precious piece of "property" is very recent. What has happened to it during the scores, hundreds and millions of years since the beginning of the planet?

The first books and websites I checked out were about the history of Iowa. Though it was interesting, I found that these books were almost exclusively about what has happened after the European settlers came. They told about "discovering Iowa" in the 1700's, and indeed this is what we used to learn in grade school. Everything then was framed from the point of view of us, the foreign immigrants. The truth, of course, is  that Native Americans had already been living here for thousands and thousands of years! If any humans discovered Iowa land, it was them. I continued reading about the history of the state of Iowa, about internal struggles for power, industrial developments, carving up the land into discrete sections owned by individuals, the setting up of government. But I decided this was not really what I was interested in. These histories were not about the land. They were about the people who took it over. So I went further back in time. I checked out books on the natural and geological history Iowa. That was better. 

(To be continued..., stay tuned)

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