The other challenge to any intentional community -be it a town, city or village, is that our skills at social interaction have atrophied. As our lives got busier and our focus shifted to our work lives and our nuclear family, the rituals that nurture and sustain community relationships have fallen from our realm of habit.
Sense of place is a concept rapidly disappearing in a world defined by access that defines all constraints of time and geography. However, the human need to belong, to be defined by larger rhythms, and to feel a sense of fabric or continuity remain features of our biology. Here is a list of some books and films that remind us of the qualities and experiences that influence our relationship to place and that provide us concepts to help us make conscious choices about the world we create.
Just as we orient ourselves by the dependable rising and setting of the sun, or the geology of the place we call home, we used to orient ourselves by the rhythms of seasons and the patterns of rain, winds and annual cycles. We have lost one of our compass bearings. As the needle spins more and more wildly, and weird is the only thing we can depend upon, how do we orient? What is it in the human psyche that is being fractured as we are forced to surrender notions of external stability? How deep do those fracture lines run and what do those subterranean reverberations invite us to open to?
Whether you are moving, ending a relationship, grieving the death of a loved one, changing careers or experiencing another kind of dramatic disruption in your habits and rhythms, you may be experiencing a dislocation from your physical environment, your routines and the ways you ground yourself.
Any transition you undertake (or are forced into) can evoke fear and doubt. You can feel disoriented and confused as your center of balance shifts. Transition is about loss, about the death of what you knew or who you knew yourself to be.
Incongruity in your environment is an invitation to greater inner alignment. When you are suffering from:
~the inability to feel belonging
~discomfort and disorientation in your living environment
~disappointment in your newly built, purchased or remodeled home
~failure to adjust to major life transitions
~chronic disorganization
you are in the midst of an opportunity to deepen your connection to your values and needs.
What we choose as our environment and what we express in our environment can be metaphors for our inner landscapes. The nonverbal holds the key to that which is beyond our mental understanding, that which is wanting to be expressed. If we are not artists, there are few places in our daily lives where we have access to that which exists below our conscious awareness. Our relationship to our physical environment is one of the places we are able to have a kind of interchange with deeper realms of experience.