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Biking to Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge: 750 caloriesOverpriced hotel orange juice: $4
Overpriced breakfast sandwich $9
Conversation with Fred: priceless
After three and half hours of conversation about blogging, place, education, and life, we were just getting warmed up, and by the end of the moring I felt a genuine intellectual kinship with this person that I had never met in person before this morning. Looking back, it now seems both amazing and utterly natural to meet up in Cambridge on Monday morning and chat with a blogger from Virginia. It seems fitting that place blogging should at times spill off the screen into a breakfast meeting or a walk in the woods (see Lorianne's account of meeting Fred on Sunday), and it give me hope that we can find ways to use new media to connect to both places and people in deeper ways.
As I was biking back along the Charles, I found myself admitting to myself that I love Boston and I love my work, both my disseration project and my instructional design work at BC. While I don't sense that I'm "married" to this place, as Fred is able to say about Floyd County, this statement of committment is important for me to begin saying to myself and to others in order to fully be here, for however long that may last. Sure, I've grown to really like being in Boston and I generally have been happy with with my work the last year or two, but it was important to me to actually say it.
"marrying" a place
I'm so interested and moved to read what you've written about your desire to be in a committed relationship with the place where you live. I've long had this thought, and wondered if it was a unique level of neurosis on my part. I once lived in a city I was deeply in love with. The outer physical and social landscape there interacted in a complex, satisfying way with my inner landscape. When I left I missed it terribly and cried every time I went back. In the end I stopped going, as it seemed to mitigate against getting on with a new life in a new home. It truly felt like leaving a lover. I've lived without this for many years, but am now determined, post 'mid-life crisis', to find this deep sense of home again. I'm delighted and deeply relieved to find some of you bloggers of place are people who think in these terms. I'll be sticking around to learn more.
Jean
Bravo to Jean
... for upping the ante by using the term "committed relationship." Has someone designed an appropriate "wedding" for a "marriage" of person and place? As with that other committed-relationship controversy, Massachusetts will probably have to lead on this ...
Cheers, Jarrett, http://urbanist.typepad.com
meeting Fred & marrying Boston
It's fascinating that you talked about loving/marrying a place since this idea has been in my mind lately, probably because I recently divorced & am thus thinking about relationships & place. I love Boston--when went down to meet Fred, actually, I got a bit choked up on the way, feeling like I really miss the city itself like a friend. At the same time, I love Keene...I guess I'm a geographic bigamist since I can't decide which I like better, my quiet little mountain town or its flashier big city sister. :-)
What's that old song lyric: "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." I'm not sure that's very ethical in terms of human relationships, but maybe it applies perfectly well to relating with places?
--Lorianne
http://www.hoardedordinaries.com
Marrying Place
"If needed" needs to get defined, of course. And, yes, I love this flat little flooded pocket of the universe...