I was born in a place I've never been to.

I was born in a place I've never been to.

I first read this mind-bending sentence in a student composition.   It was the reason someone started a journal collecting all the charming and entertaining things our students wrote while trying to grasp the right words in an unfamiliar language.  (“Malaria is a very popular disease in China,” is another one of the phrases that has stuck in my head.  A good example of a thesaurus run amok.)  But years later these words keep coming back to me. What at first seemed so amusing and obviously an impossibility, seems like poetry to me now.  For this student it meant that he hadn't been to his birthplace after he was an infant and didn't remember anything about it. But isn't this true for us all?  From the moment we are born, the machinations of modern society begin to mold our perceptions, our expectations of how things should be, of what to expect from this world we live in. Babies are born into right angles, metal and plastic and bright lights instead of moss-lined baskets, dappled shade, warm breezes, faeries whispering their fortunes in their tiny pink ears.  It's so swift, this change from the natural to the constructed world.  But we never forget completely.  We yearn.  I see it everywhere.  We yearn for the natural, for wonder, for beauty.

Sometimes just looking back at the choices I've made in my life, I am amazed at how strong was my urge to keep the connections with the magical, the natural.  I still have the first book I ever bought with my own money.  A book of English fairytales illustrated by Arthur Rackam, an artist I thought I discovered and admired many years later.  And then later as a teen my choice didn't waiver.  I remember a very special day when mother, brother and I happened upon an old bookshop in Morristown just off the green. The books lined the walls way up to a very high ceiling.  There were rows and rows of books and magazines with little space to walk in between.  Everything stacked in crates piled up on makeshift shelves.  It all looked pretty precarious, as did the health and hygiene of the craggily shop owner.  And in all this chaos, I found an ancient copy of Grimm's fairytales.  I still remember the trepidation I felt taking the book to the grizzled old shop owner to ask the price.  So I got my Grimm's fairytale book, and of course the wonderful memory of a shop of books, dusty, poorly lit, a maze to explore.  A magical place set up just for me to enjoy.  And to remember.  It seems like it could have been a dream, except for the reality of that old book still on my shelf.

Next I remember a trip to Madison when I was studying social change and development. What do I acquire while on my visit?  Is it a treatise on Marxism and the relation of women to the workplace?  Not really.  It's a golden unicorn charm.  And from London while studying the women's movement in the U.K., a small mirror with a flower fairy painted on the other side.  

So lately I have been entertaining myself with more and more of these realizations.  Realizations of how I have always kept the natural world as a part of mine.  And also the realization that when I do follow my heart and create something to celebrate the natural, I get a surprisingly positive response from others.

A great example of this is the garden in front of my house.  It is not the well-designed perennial garden of books and landscapers.  It's sort of the opposite of that.  The rocks on the hill were placed not in straight lines but in random-looking outcroppings.  It looks like the remnants of an ancient stone building.  Perfect, at least to me.  I made it for myself but was a bit concerned that others might not appreciate it.  Right there on the parkway, right in the front yard.  But a surprising and delightful thing happened. People seemed to be magically drawn to the garden.  They photographed it, they crossed the parkway to tell me how much they loved it, they put notes in my mailbox thanking me for it, they spent time looking at all the different plants like it was a botanical garden.  The children in the neighborhood made it a required stop on their daily walks around the block.  And started giving gifts to the gargoyle.  And of course getting gifts in return.  

Nature.  When we take the time to open ourselves to it, we are enriched in some primal way, some truly special way.  Just losing yourself in the center of one flower, so amazing. Looking closely at an insect.  Such beauty.  Taking the time to really look will convince you that there is magic in the natural world.  If you dissect a bumblebee, you will never find the buzzing or even discover how it flies.  If you remove a flower from its stem and its connection to the earth, immediately it starts to wither.

The earth is still supreme.  It can twist our metal girders and crush our concrete at whim.  It can inundate our shores and wash away our houses.  It can twist whole towns and suck them up into the sky.  When we desecrate the ocean, it ceases to breathe life into the corals, into the fish.  When we desecrate nature, ignore it, laugh at it as if it is trivial, we start to wither ourselves.  When we celebrate, explore, elevate the natural, we are renewed.  And that's why people stop at my garden, enjoy my drawings, even talk to my garden gnome.

Sometimes I am asked, “What is it you do?”  Kind of a difficult one to answer.  I sew, draw, paint, felt, photograph, write, bind books.  It seems so chaotic, except if you take a closer look.  Everything I do revolves around the natural world and a bit of the enchanted.  Whatever it is, it is a necessary part of who I am.  A part that doesn't change as I go through life.  Is it my gift?  I hope so.  A wonderful gift, of nature, of life, of beauty, of wonder, and even a bit of enchantment.  A very wonderful gift.  

So I may have been born in a place I’ve never been to, but I am searching for my home.  And so far? What a great trip.