Thoughts on Place, Stories, and Home

dreams of the city / placemaking

The stories we tell about the places we inhabit, the places we frequent, the places we visit - these are the stories of our lives. In fact, these stories are our lives.

In a dream, I was facilitating a workshop. I asked the people in attendance to draw a map of the city, in this case Toronto, and to identify landmarks that were meaningful to them. I wanted them to draw their version of the city - the city endowed with meaning from an individual perspective, an individual narrative, an individual experience.

I then asked people to share their maps with the larger group, and to explain the significance of the landmarks they had identified. I wanted participants to negotiate with each other about which landmarks got included in the map of the city.

Through this process of collaborative deliberation, individual maps informed a collective map. While the map no longer told an individual story, it was infused with many voices, making it richer and more meaningful to a larger group. By the same token, some of the individual meaning was lost.

Stories about who we are, about where we’ve come from, and about how we navigate our surroundings connect us to each other. Stories also connect us to places, and to the place(s) we consider to be home.

homesickness / places i miss / places that mean something

For me, a feeling homesickness is often heralded by vivid images of home - places that mean something, places I’m viscerally connected to, and sometimes flashes of relatively insignificant places (a strip mall, a stretch of road in my hometown, a particular vantage point) that nevertheless carry the sense of home.

These flashes of memories are often unexpected, and I am not consciously aware of any connection between these memory snippets and my real time activity or setting. I also notice that in the month or so preceding a trip home, these flashes occur more frequently.

Home is a complicated concept. It means many different things - a house or apartment where you sleep at night; a place or geographic location where you live or grew up; a feeling of comfort and protection and cozy love.

I believe we can have multiple home locations. But the place where you grew up, where your memories are rooted in the ground like the cedar forests where I spent my childhood walking and hiking and playing and exploring - I only have one of these. For me, this place is BC. More specifically, it’s BC’s Lower Mainland.

Homesickness does not usually feel sad in a mournful way, but there is a feeling of longing and nostalgia. When my memory flashes of home start to occur more frequently in the month before I travel to BC, I feel excited and giddy. But I also long for home more strongly than usual, which sometimes makes my current home location in Toronto seem particularly dreary and grey and tiring, and the lack of ocean views, salt breezes, mountains and accessible hiking trails more persistently annoying.

I think I have come to accept a feeling of perpetual homesickness, a BC tinged ache, that never quite goes away.