Written by the Land

How the Earth Itself Authors Our Bodies, Our Habits, and Our Interior Lives

The body is not separate from the land; it is a living archive of it. We are, ultimately, written by the land—place writes us. And this is why we must write place, and write it well.

The poet Gary Snyder wrote, “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” Our bodies know this, even when we forget. Our bones carry the salt of ancient seas; our lungs are tuned to the weight of the air we breathe; our skin remembers the elements that have touched it.

The geographies of our childhoods mark us like the sediment layers in stone. In Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard mused that our physical environments influence our psychic landscapes. “[T]he house shelters day-dreaming,” he says. “The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” By house, he points not just to the physical structures we live inside of, but the larger structure of landscape that holds the houses. So, we do not merely inhabit geography; we dream through it. Our inner lives arrange themselve…