Sense of Place

 

I have always had difficulty awarding personal value to “place.” I have places that I love, places that I would like to see, and places that I want to get to know better. I feel connections to spaces I have never seen before, but do not value their geographical or cultural identity as part of my own. Furthermore, there are places I have spent a great deal of time and energy in that I still feel little to no connection to (ie. UNBC). The images represented on my “sense of place” map depict physical elements of place that stand out for me in my memories of various places that I would consider meaningful. I feel close to the fireweed and hills near Cluculz Lake. I am drawn to the Union Jack and the Filipino national flag because they were staples of my parents’ individual identities. I included paw prints and an elephant head because these are the animals I imagine when I think of places where I want to be. The image in the centre is me. I walk forward towards places that I am excited to see and away from countless places I have already forgotten. I bring with me the elements of place that have become part of my identity. My sense of place is continually shifting to accommodate new memories, new aspirations, and new experiences.

One idea that resonated with me throughout my undergraduate degree, and continues to plague me to this day, comes from a theory put forward by Plato about the “form of the good.” He asserts that for a term to have definite meaning, there must be something in common to all versions of that term. Consider a chair. What is common to all chairs? What must an artisan know in order to properly construct a chair? (Kemerling, 2011).

It is likely that many artisans would have different images in their heads of what the perfect chair would look like. They would vary by colour, size, shape, etc. One might even use a table or a ledge as a chair. So, if anything can be a chair, then how are we to define it? No chair can be exactly like the one you have made up in your head. In Plato’s theory, all chairs simply exhibit a form of “chairness” because no single chair could possibly be like everything we consider chair-like.

Back to sense of place. I think that “place” resonates differently for everyone. I know that many people discuss place for its physical features, for the culture associated with the geography, for the history that happened there. My sense of place relies on the memories I have made in any one place, but I bring those memories with me rather than leaving them in the ephemeral space.

If you were to shut off all the lights in the room and shine a flashlight through my sense of place map, you would see the chair that my image of self is walking towards. I represented the chair as a constellation of stars because, if anything, I feel like my identity is connected to how small I am in a giant universe. I am always moving towards my sense of “place-ness,” but I admit that I am not yet there. Right now, my sense of place is an aspiration I look forward to, an image I hold in my mind and wonder if it is something I will actually find or if I will forever feel like it is not quite the same as I imagined. Part of this journey is becoming an educator. I think I am still searching for place and I might be for a very long time.

Kemerling, Garth. 2011. “Plato: Immortality and the Forms.”

https://www.philosophypages.com.