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I walk out of my house onto a country road. If I go north two miles, I’ll be in the Gila National Forest, 3 million acres of pure New Mexico: ponderosa pine, pinon pine, scrub oak, juniper, yucca, prickly pear. The names of familiar species are like the beads on a rosary: mountain lion, black bear, javelina, coati. If I walk south five miles, I can turn onto Highway 180 and find my way to anywhere, Dallas or Paris or Bangkok. By God (and here comes my first imitation of Walt Whitman) I live in the best of places! The best of times! My pleasures as democratic as the cloud-tossed sky.
I choose north, low hills of mesquite and shrub brush on my left, the cottonwoods of the Gila River on my right. In thirty minutes of fast walking, I pass the homes of the field director for the Nature Conservancy, retired professors from Alaska, and a worker for the state highway department. I pass the gate to an intentional community with the sign “War is not the answer,” where people live frugally—reducing, recycling, gardening. Next to their compound is a rancher whose grandfather worked for the Forest Service here in 1907 when the Forest Service was a new idea. As the asphalt turns to dirt, I pass the driveway of a free-lance editor and then an archaeological site dating from 500 A.D., a grazed-down field with a mule and two horses, and a second dirt road leading to a first-grade school teacher, a potter, and a construction worker.
This is the diversity of the rural West, perhaps of all rural America. Walt Whitman would have put us in one of his lists--poet of the carpenter, the deacon, the duck-shooter, the milkmaid, the stevedore, the crone. We’re Baptists and pantheists; we eat beef and drink soymilk; we like wolves and hate wolves, and we’re new and old and rich and poor. What we have in common is a feeling that some of us would be uncomfortable talking about, and some of us talk about all the time. We love this place. We are the bride of this place and we are the groom.
The idea is so strange to contemporary culture that we need new words to describe it. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht--who coined solastalgia for the pain humans feel when their home environment is degraded or destroyed—is now promoting soliphilia from the Greek philia (love of), the French solidaire (interdependent), and the Latin solidus (solid or whole). Soliphilia is “the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet, and the unity of interrelated interests within it.” The term joins biophilia--love of living systems, described by psychologist Eric Fromm in 1964 and later promoted by biologist E.O. Wilson--and topophilia, from the Greek topo for place, used by mid-century poets like W.H. Auden and Alan Watts. When I was a college student majoring in environmental studies in the 1970s, we preferred mouthfuls like bioregionalism and ecopsychology and the mysterious-sounding deep ecology.
All these neologisms built on the work of America’s first ecophilosophers, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who built in turn on previous philosophers and world cultures. Indigenous voices swell the chorus. In the most modern version, we wonder now if love of place is hardwired. Can we find that spot in the brain? Make it light up the PET scan? And perhaps turn it up a notch?
In less than an hour’s walk, I am at the national forest boundary, looking down over fields of prickly pear and mesquite, an undulating rise and fall of land lifting into the rocky hills above the Gila River, rock eroded into giant cones or Stetson hats, and the cliffs rearing beyond them, the rim rock of Watson Mountain pink and orange and white. Then, more grandeur, the bright blue New Mexican sky, a deep azure contrasted with the white and grey of a storm in the distance. My chest feels hollow, lungs and heart evaporated. Within that emptiness, something flowers against the ribcage. A pressure, an ache. That’s how I feel my love. This only happens, of course, when I am paying attention.
My body responds physically to the Gila Valley, most often to its expansive views, but also down in the irrigated pastures, with the cows and smell of alfalfa, and by the river with its modest flow, sunlight on water and the flap of a heron. Love of place opens me to the beauty of the world, which can be found everywhere, city and suburb, desert and rainforest. A world full of places that people love.
Love of place makes me feel larger. When I open to the world, the boundaries of self-- my worries and fears, what makes Sharman happy, what makes Sharman sad, the particulars of childhood, talents and flaws, that day in high school, this pain in my knee— diminish against the lift of land. The colors and cliffs. I’m as big as this view, five miles wide. I’m as powerful as the storm in the distance. But also calm. Time passes. The river floods and changes everything, and then everything changes again. No worries. No flaws. Nothing is untoward.
I feel grateful. And then, because I am human and flawed, I feel smug. I’m so special to live in this special place.
The cultural historian Thomas Berry described human consciousness as “the universe reflecting on itself.” The Big Bang, the birth of stars and planets, the evolution of life on Earth and specifically of Homo sapiens all resulted in a woman standing before this view of mountains and clouds. She notes her feelings: calm, blessed, self-congratulatory. Maybe the universe could have chosen more wisely, but let's not spoil the moment.
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