I believe that among our most important relationships is the one with place. We possess a well-developed sense of place, which I define as the experience of living in a human body in a landscape, the accumulation of memories, and the effect of surroundings on our emotional landscapes.

Relationship with place is also our most neglected relationship.

I believe that place sees you. What I mean by “see” is that it responds to your presence in the way a deer responds.

We urge restlessness in our children—if they are to be successful, they should leave the place where they were born and reared, and they should stay away permanently. Paul Gruchow wrote about this in Grass Roots: The Universe of Home. He says in the essay “What We Teach Rural Children,” “We raise our most capable rural children from the beginning to expect that as soon as possible they will leave and that if they are at all successful, they will never return. We impose upon them, in effect, a kind of homelessness.” (Recognizing, of course, that sometimes our places become uninhabitable, for all kinds of reasons.)

I believe we’re made of place, elementally, that it is stamped in our DNA. Like messenger pigeons and many other creatures, we possess a homing instinct. Home imprints on us.

Because many of us live far from birthplaces, we experience displacement, usually in the form of nostalgia or longing. When we long for home, sometimes we are longing for a place from the very far past, even a place we never knew.

Industrial society has obliterated a lot of places. Now climate change is destroying places rapidly.

If You Too Are Obsessed by Place

I have now written a manual for connecting with place, easy accessible and very readable. It contains 52 Explorations, one a week, for

getting grounded

improving your sense of place

feeling as if you belong

healing this place-wound

Each Exploration contains a tiny essay, a feet-on-the-ground exercise, and a writing prompt. I include lots of beautiful quotes about place and references for further study.

The book is Journey in Place: A Field Guide to Belonging.

If you would like a copy, Kickstarter is the only place to get it at the moment, and you get the best price. A paperback is $20, with $5 shipping added on. The Kickstarter is running for 20 days. It ends Oct. 25, 2025, and the books will be mailed out soon after, around the end of October.

Get the Place Book

A Great Writer of Place

Pat Conroy felt a deep connection with his place, coastal South Carolina. Recently I finished his 800-page tome, Beach Music, and I marveled at his writing on place.

Allow me to quote a couple of passages.

A squadron of brown pelicans flew overhead, their shape and wingspan so effortless in the morning air that their appearance seemed a quiet psalm in praise of flight itself. They passed over us like shadows stolen from the souls of other shadows.

Writing doesn’t get any better than that, does it?

In that summer, I would remember my friends and their souls, light and air-streamed as mallards, set loose among the vast table linen of the great salt marshes, happy among the green riches of a land so full with life that the rivers smelled like some perfect distillate made of spartina and the albumen of eggs.

One more from Beach Music by Pat Conroy.

The sunset turned the marsh gold and the western sky transformed itself into a window of rose and violet as its edges flowered and dimpled in its final burning haze. The water around us caught fire and the boat rested in a pool of cold flame.

🦬 #Radical Sustainability

🦬 Farm Report

We are rebuilding the greenhouse. It’s a tiny pit greenhouse, dug 18 inches or so into the ground and the floor lined with bricks. It was built originally out of used sliding-glass doors, but the framing slowly rotted over the years, so it needs to be redone. My husband, Raven, has ordered the materials from our local hardware store, and the lumber will be delivered this afternoon.

Hopefully we are still four to six weeks away from first frost, but the winter’s hay for the animals has arrived and stored under the old tobacco barn. For now, the cows and horses have green grass, but as soon as frost happens, green grass will be over for the year.

Luckily we planted a late round of Seminole pumpkins, and some of them are full size, albeit still green. They need to ripen before the first freeze—we can cover them with blankets for a mild frost. (Coming later this month: recipe for Pumpkin Soup.)

Oriental persimmons are ready. We plant the Fuyu variety, which can be eaten like an apple when firm or like a pudding when fully ripened. See recipe below.

One of our horses, a white Paso Fino, is frighteningly scrawny. The vet says she needs her teeth floated (filed down to fit against each other) but finding a large-animal vet who makes farm calls has been difficult.

🦬 Phenology

The full Harvest Moon came up fat, orange, and beautiful. I was stuck teaching a Zoom workshop when it rose. I saw a light above my laptop and realized what was happening. That was a pitiful moment, to be watching the moon rise above the horizon and also above my computer screen.

I saw the first kestrel on Sept. 19, then two more arrived to power lines on the road on Oct. 1. This year, I call the October full moon Kestrel Moon.

Wingstem is blooming, again replete with pollinators.

Bluebirds had a very productive year, because their numbers are up here at the farm. I see lots of blue flashes and blue winks when I look out across the pastures and the orchard.

🦬 Currently

Reading: House of Smoke, newly released memoir by John T. Edge

Listening to: Sarah Fay’s interview with Austin Kleon about Substack, here

Worrying about: Families being torn apart by ICE raids

Enjoying: 14-month-old Little Fawn’s accretion of vocabulary words (“uh-oh” when something falls is her latest)

🦬 Recipe

Our friend Laura Potts-Wirht and her husband run a persimmon orchard near us called Sweet Georgia Fuyu. Their trees are now hanging with glowing orange fruits. Laura shared a recipe with me for Fuyu Fall Salad, and I wanted to pass it along to you, in case you have access to Oriental persimmons.

Fuyu Fall Salad361KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

Little Fawn grappling with her first Fuyu persimmon.🦬 Don’t Forget the Kickstarter

It ends 10-25-25 at 10:25. I hope you check out what I’ve made.

Okay. Take Me There.

🦬 As Ever

Be well, be wild, be kind, be of good service.