Place, Land and Work: how do we start to belong?

I arrived at Lester B. Pearson Airport in Toronto, Ontario at 3:45pm EDT on Friday 18^th May 2018 at the start of a nine month sabbatical from my job at Surrey Wildlife Trust while I ran the Hedgelaying in the Ontario Landscape Project at The University of Waterloo. In 2016 I had, with my friends and colleagues Nigel and Jef, been invited to give talks and demonstrations on hedgerows and hedgelaying, and attend seminars to explore themes such as place-making, collective stewardship, agro-ecology and resilience. The new and very welcome offer had come from the HOL project’s architect Professor Stephen Quilley to manage practical elements of the project including hedgerow planting and the creation of more rural skills-themed courses which would explore the connections between craft, ecology, community and place.

It was also a very personal opportunity for me finally to be with Sarah, Farm Manager at Mount Wolfe Farm. We had first met on the HOL trip to Canada in 2016, Mount Wolfe Farm being one of the hedgelaying demonstration sites, although nothing but sparkling conversation and the sense of a connection has passed between us then. It wa snot until the following year that we decided to embark on an impossibly long-distance relationship when Sarah came to England to learn hedgelaying from Nigel a Adams. So my sabbatical was a chance now to live together at last to see if we were as good and as strong as it we felt we were. Ultimately to continue our relationship long-term I was facing a life-altering continent-shifting change.

I had left behind an England warming gently from Spring to Summer and expected the blossoming May sunshine to help me settle into my new home. Instead within a few days the weather was in the high 20s to low 30s celsius made worse by the attendant humidity that characterises the Great Lakes weather system. With the heavy air came the mosquitoes, especially numerous in the wooded creek and wetland areas of the farm. It seemed that vast squadrons of them descended on me every time I left the house as if they sensed I was a exotic and exciting meal. Their attacks left my flesh red and swollen, but It also felt like a personal challenge from the Nature Gods of this continent: this is NOT your home. I wonder how the first settlers felt in this new land, accustomed as they were to the mild climates of Europe, then faced with a struggle to survive in an unforgiving landscape. Its a testament perhaps to conditions they left that they chose to stay when arguably they should have returned, for this was not their land to settle, and now Canada is occupied with more settlers than indigenous peoples. Yet settlers now call this home, and have recently celebrated 150 years calling it their new home.

I stepped off the plane into this new place on the 18^th May but what did that mean exactly? Anthropologist David Seamon contends that, as an integral structure of human life, place can be understood in terms of three dimensions:

“…first, the geographical ensemble—i.e., the material environment, including both its natural and human-made dimensions; second, people-in-place, including individual and group actions, intentions, and meanings; and, third, spirit of place, or genius loci. “

David Seamon, A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology in Environment-Behavior Research. S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and H. Minami (Eds.), Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research (pp. 157-78), New York: Plenum, 2000, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2214430

While I had been here now four times in my life for short stays, and while it was certain that I had arrived at a geographic location- 43.6777° N, 79.6248° W– it was only familiar enough to allow me to navigate my way through arrivals and find the right pillar at the front of the airport where Sarah and her mother Sheilagh were waiting to great me. I had no real sense of where I had arrived.

I never returned to work at The Wildlife Trust once I had made the decision that Ontario- and with Sarah- was the place where I wanted my Story to continue. In contemplating my arrival now two years later as a permanent resident of Canada, I am examining whether I truly knew the place I left as deeply as I could have. Did I take the relationship with the place I grew up in for granted, and do I now only appreciate it for having left it? I have been prevented from returning home since January because of the COVID 19 pandemic, and I find myself missing the strangest things like seaside towns in the winter and even the high street shopping experience, so hard to find in mall-town Canada. I have no regrets for making my choice, but I am intrigued by the unfolding relationships to place I am discovering as the shores of the British Isles retreat into memory and Iseek to understand my connection to this new land. In England I was a native with an ancestral history and a land relationship dating back thousands of years or more (probably to Celts and Saxons). In Canada I am a settler, a descendent of colonists intent on resource exploitation, who at their worst traded humans. Can I ever belong here?

I wonder if you can overcome not being born in a land by working in it and for it, or will you always be an immigrant, an outsider? I suspect that some people born to a country never have a deep relationship with the physical geography of a place and the deep belonging- the ecological citizenship- that working on and with the land confers. My two favourite explorers of space relationships Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry write about work as the best way to bring yourself into a relationship with the land.

“Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there.”

Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds

So I work: I make and tend hedgerows; from the woodland here I shape spoons and grow mushrooms and maybe even tap maple syrup. I am planning to get the forge up and running again soon. With all these skills I”m trying to foster a community of crafters, a natural marriage with the farming that Sarah and her family are such champions at. I garden with MsPlants of Caledon. I Occasionally like this morning I pick beans and check chickens. One day I may get some sheep, if that feels right.

And I write and teach and find others seeking to understand this complex and wonderful dance between the individual and the community and the Place we all call home.

And from work and being in place, come stories…..

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