A Reflection on Rootedness
Walking through my neighborhood tonight, I’m feeling bittersweet about moving. If all goes to plan, I’ll be moving to Chicago in a month’s time — so soon! Madison has been my home for the past six and a half years and I’ve even lived in the same couple blocks for all but six months of that time. I have roots here at this point, to be sure.
I remember my senior year of college, the last chunk of time where I was living in quaint little St. Peter, Minnesota. I had roots there, too. There were times when I was walking along the college sidewalks and trails in the arboretum, heading to class or a friend’s apartment, where I would close my eyes. It was like a little game — do I know this place well enough in a very immediate, physical, tangible sense that I can navigate safely and effectively even without my vision? I never closed my eyes all that long, really. But even just ten seconds of walking without sight, feeling my feet hitting confidently on the path I intended to tread gave an intensely freeing sort of feeling, one that can only come from deep intimacy with a place. The depth of our relationship with a particular somewhere is exactly what allows for the fluidity of agency that is at the base of genuine freedom. These are beautiful, deeply human experiences.
I tried closing my eyes as I walked through my neighborhood tonight, too. Did it work? Did it feel quite the same? I’m not sure, though it made me smile nonetheless. Life has been moving so fast these past few years I’ve probably missed out on some of the opportunity for this deeper level of connection. But despite that, this remains my home as much as any other home I’ve had. It has been somewhere I’ve grown into myself as a genuine adult, experienced many joys and treasured memories, and had opportunities to participate in and even build community with others. I also have grief and regrets that will forever be entwined with my relationship to this place and my memories of it — my memories of myself as the person who really lived here, for a time.
It’s all so radiant in particularity — the place, the people, the climate, the ecosystems, the urbanism… the view from my south-east facing bedroom window in 2021 where you could see the illuminated signs of the businesses across the freeway when it was unobstructed in the winter, no longer visible with the new apartment buildings that sprung up, a new building where a dear friend actually lived for a time… A moment, fall of 2020 when I’m nannying — there are some sandhill cranes near the pond and I watch as one of my kids (then only six, now much older) briefly looks at them and I’m struck as if by lightning with some kind of realization of the sheer intimacy of life… Two of my sweet cats are buried at a house here — when we buried the first, I caught my shirt on the branch of a pine tree and tore a little hole which has since been patched up (probably by my mom) but still my favorite shirt (wore it yesterday) will always have the bump just next to the left shoulder blade where this tear happened after we buried Mitsy…
And just as particular — me. All the layers of self that I’ve grown, and shed, grown and shed… I wonder if such things can somehow be left behind in a place, no longer us (though they once were), no longer needed (though certainly they once were thought to be), but perhaps they may serve as a kind of compost — culturally and spiritually — for those who remain in the place. This wild idea at least gives me some comfort.
It’s time for me to go. I feel I’ve done what I can in this place — at least for now — and the sediments of one’s past in a smaller city like this can certainly accumulate in an almost claustrophobic sort of way over time, though with the right attitude and skills this can also be great material for some sandcastles. In any case, there are new horizons of my own experience and being-in-the-world yearning for realization, but a novel context and the equally radiant particularity of its elements are a prerequisite for this.
But the excitement of these new horizons does not make leaving any easier, any less monumental. While the future remains open, closing a chapter of one’s life has a certain eerie finality to it — so this really is exactly all that will have happened in this era, in this place, eh? Of course the memories will always remain as a vibrant storehouse of experience, always primed for new interpretation, new meanings. But there is an eeriness to this, too — perhaps we will have really best understood our rootedness somewhere only after we have left, once the moments and images and episodes have sufficiently congealed into some genuine unity that we can finally get a holistic look at it.
As Kierkegaard writes in his journals, “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.”
So, onward I shall go, underprepared and preemptively homesick, but I think maybe this is the right state to be in, at least in order to maintain real intimacy with my self — past, present, and future — as a genuinely place-rooted being. May the next chapter include just as much astonishing particularity as this one — not sure what else I could build a beautiful life out of!
