I’ve been time-travelling back to my undergrad years and re-reading Basso’s (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places. In his reflection on the Apache view of the landscape, he states that it is seen as:

a repository of distilled wisdom, a stern but benevolent keeper of tradition, an ever-vigilant ally… features of the landscape have become symbols of and for this way of living, the symbols of a culture and the enduring moral character of its people. (Basso, 1996; p.63)

Basso proceeds to discuss how the role of landscape in shaping social activity, and the way in which the Apache “constitute their surroundings and invest them with value and significance” (p.66). He proposes that this “moral relationship”, the cultural ecology, is often ignored in research.

Reading this brought to mind The Irish Border (@BorderIrish) Twitter account. With the current unease and uncertainty about the Brexit outcome, someone has set up an account to give the Border a voice in the negotiations.

Imagine if Brexit day came next March, despite all my warnings, and I unleashed an ancient curse that had been entrusted to my geological strata by the druids, and the skies did darken and moan, and clamour was rampant, and strife did reign amongst the nations. I’m just saying

— The Irish Border (@BorderIrish) August 15, 2018

In its own way, this account provides a symbolic, cultural representation of the land. It is a way of acknowledging the myriad difficulties woven into the negotiations. The person who set up the account tweeted recently that they sometimes think they are the Border. It is done so well that others who follows the account may also get a stronger sense of the impact of the negotiations through the voice of the border. I’m sure @BorderIrish would be quite happy to be viewed as an ever-vigilant keeper of wisdom!

This caused me to wonder if there were similar Twitter accounts, other ways in which Landscape or Place was being voiced, albeit by a human (as far as I know!). I could see @BorderIrish has a friend in @Malin_Head. This brought a smile to my face. Notwithstanding that it may be the same author masterminding the two accounts, having two Irish Places building an online relationship is really a very Irish thing to do. Which I believe I can safely say as an Irish person myself 🙂

I searched for other examples; all of the national parks that I came across in the US and UK had the same event-style timeline. Come to this event on this date, here’s a photo of a view, what temperature is it today, don’t forget to take your litter home. No sense of the places themselves communicating except perhaps through the captured image or video. The moderators of these accounts have taken the view, and rightly so, that people should visit the locations to develop their personal relationships with those places. All good. Still, it feels impersonal, hollow and a bit absent. Maybe it’s just me.

Widening my search to a broader sense of location, I realised that the libraries are particularly good at this. Granted, libraries are all marvelous at everything they do, but they have really captured the spirit of this approach. I’ve embedded a couple of classics from @ShetlandLibrary and @natlibscot below as examples. Scottish examples, so maybe this is a Celtic thing, to acknowledge that there is no reason why Places can’t have and be friends. I love the ongoing banter between @ShetlandLibrary and @OrkneyLibrary. Again, there is something more meaningful for me in having a sense of the libraries talking to each other, developing their friendship in an online space. And yes, I have read their tweets; I know that, deep down, they really love each other 🙂

We have the NHS behind us 👍 https://t.co/STKX79qIMB

— Shetland Library (@ShetlandLibrary) August 22, 2018

*Must be onions in the room or something*
*Blinks hard*
*Sniffs*
*Dreamily stares* https://t.co/BGgvuOEpFl

— National Library of Scotland (@natlibscot) August 23, 2018

The significance and presence of landscape that Basso (1996) outlines is the personhood of places which is finally being legally recognised, as for the Whanganui River. I am not suggesting Twitter accounts carry the same value. They are not Places speaking, but people speaking for Places. Maybe more Places need us to speak for them or reflect on what they might say if we could hear them. Either way, I am curious if these types of accounts are an indication that this is something we are reaching out for, a need that has been denied for too long in my culture, and that we are seeking a way to articulate.

If you know of any other accounts, let me know!

Reference

Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press. https://unmpress.com/books/wisdom-sits-places/9780826317247

In my post last week, I was thinking about how the digital could function as a “thin place”, creating that magical sense of almost there, a step apart from someone and somewhere on the planet. This week, Ruth Stalker-Firth kept my mind whirring on that thought. I love that sense of synchronicity when ideas seem to draw in others, though my supervisors tell me that happens when you are early in your PhD and everything seems connected to your research 🙂

Ruth asks “Where do we go when we go online?” and talks in her post about attending a live webinar with Eckhart Tolle. His talk focuses on living in the now,  discussing how we can live fully in the present, while considering how our online practices can serve to distract, pull us into the “collective unconscious” as Ruth terms it. We go online and lose awareness of time and place.

I began to wonder about presence, our physical presence like mine in the garden, and our virtual presence when we are connecting to the Internet… I was off wondering: Where do we go in the space? (Stalker-Firth, 2018)

I smiled as I read this – as Ruth was distracted from Eckhart’s talk as she wondered about our virtual presence, I was equally distracted from her discussion of the research, caught in her “peripheral” report of her surroundings. I was sitting in her garden listening to the birds tweet and the traffic go by, echoed in the sounds of tweet and traffic in my own garden. I was feeling my breath and thinking about my presence. I had stepped out of time, and through her description, my virtual self had traveled to sit with her. Her brief description of her garden was not enough for me to visualise my/her surroundings, but there I was, sitting beside her, eyes closed, breathing deep and listening to the birds.

This medium – the Internet – expands us and influences how the message is perceived and so, creates a symbiotic relationship. (Stalker-Firth, 2018)

By now, you will have realised I’m a sucker for symbiotic relationships. Ruth’s comment above weaves into my previous thoughts on this, on the digital, on the physical and the lack of boundaries between what is “me” and “everything else.

I believe it is our desire to connect and experience and be experienced which really drives our minds, not the technology. It is our willingness to want to reach out for are hardwired for connection and shared experiences are a quick way to connect. (Stalker-Firth, 2018)

My drive is to connect beyond the human to the more-than-humans that share the place where the networked human is located. I wonder if it is possible to reach out and connect with the meshwork of relations that are local to someone else. I’m aware that my experience of Ruth’s garden is tied to my current experience of birdsong and traffic in my local area, not hers. Margaret Somerville warned me already that this might be the case, that meaning-at-distance may come only through reference to my local place-based connections.

If we, as Tolle recommends, learn to cultivate a stillness inside us against which everything happens then it is will be easier to retain a sense of self online, a sense of presence, and our virtual and physical will be aligned. (Stalker-Firth, 2018)

Ruth asks “where do we go when we go online”; I add to that my own question “what do we bring with us”. If there is truly no division between “me” and “everything else”, perhaps cultivating that sense of stillness allows us to be more aware, to integrate and celebrate the all that is now and the all that surrounds and permeates us. We can acknowledge it and bring it with us, share it out into the network and allow other voices to be heard. We can welcome the presence of all our relations; I just need to fine-tune a few methods of doing that!

For now, there is more in Ruth’s post that I need to dig into, when I can stop myself getting distracted by the spring chorus. It may have only been based on my local place-connections, but it was nice to sit with Ruth in the garden, even if only for a virtual digital moment.

References

Somerville, M. (2007). Becoming-frog: a primary school place pedagogy. Australian Association for Research in Education Conference, Freemantle, 26-29 November. https://www.aare.edu.au/publications-database.php/5511/becoming-frog

Stalker-Firth, R. (2018). Virtual presence: where do we go when we go online? https://www.ruthstalkerfirth.com/virtual-presence-where-do-we-go-when-we-go-online

I have grown up with a fondness for “thin” places; places that have given me a sense that there is a “somewhere else” just a breath away. From a Celtic spirituality perspective, these places are described as sacred, close to the Otherworld, locations for pilgrimage and reflection (Béres, 2012). My thin places have rarely been those selected by tour companies; they are often liminal zones, edges of rivers, lakes, paths or woodlands, with a kind of somewhere-in-between-ness that makes me feel as if I have stepped out of the flow of time.

One of my clearest memories as a child of such a place was a family holiday to a cottage my uncle had recently purchased. The cottage stood in the middle of a ploughed and mucky field (yeay, muck!) and at the edge of the field there was a small stream running in a deep mossy ditch under trees. Though the ditch was deep, the stream was not. I liked to wade in to the middle in my wellies and stand in the quiet cavern under the green tree canopy. The sound of chuckling water and birdlife and my breath. The scent of water and moss and green and primroses. I remember the primroses most of all, as the banks were covered in them and the scent wrapped all around me. It was a magical spot; if I stood long enough and still enough, I thought, I will see fairies. To this day, the scent and sight of primroses makes me smile.

I’m thinking about these thin places as I am exploring connections to place, reading about Indigenous research methods, and thinking about my own cultural heritage. As Béres (2012) states, there is a valid concern about appropriation of the ways of other cultures. I want to draw on my own cultural heritage and wonder what exactly that is. I wish to encompass Béres’ approach as outlined below.

I am able to honour, respect and learn from North American and Australian Aboriginal ways of being with the non-human world and also from Celtic spirituality (European ways of being in pre-Christian and early Christian times) regarding the sacredness of the non-human world. (Béres, 2012; p.183)

I talked about Newgrange last week; another location that was special for me. Again, that same sense of somewhere-in-between-ness. Unsurprisingly, things have changed in the 20-odd years since I was last there! In an excellent article by Stephen Brown (2006), it seems that heritage-park marketing has run a little wild. If I return, it won’t be to the Newgrange of my memory, though it sounds like they may still be using the same light bulb to replicate the solstice. Brown’s article considers the various contested interpretations of what it means to be “Celtic” as an introduction a special issue exploring “Celtic marketing”. There are three elements to Celtic marketing, Brown suggests: practice, paradigm and philosophy. Practice is the marketing of Celtic “goods and services”, from events to merchandise and everything in between.  Paradigm “celebrates intuition, idiosyncrasy, iconoclasm and irreverence” at the heart of the Celtic ethos, which sounds like fun. Philosophy, it seems, marketers share with the Celts, who Brown describes as “proto-entrepreneurs”. As with the Celts, Brown says, Celtic marketers are “simultaneously abhorred and admired, we attract and repel, we intrigue and infuriate”. What ties the practice, paradigm and philosophy together is storytelling; the Celts are renowned “yarn-spinners”. I inherited that tale-telling gene and wonder what the Celtic researcher practice, paradigm and philosophy is.

The articles may seem like strange bedfellows, loosely connected by Celtic association. However, both articles emphasise how places are not static, even those containing structures that have stood for thousands of years. My stream and the primroses are locked in a memory, as I do not know how to return to that location and the quiet cavern may be long gone. To know a place, and for a place to know us, is simply for the moment. My sense of thin places being those briefly outside the flow of time may be linked simply to my focus on being in that place at that time. Thinking about my research and connecting with other places at distance, the thin place may prove to be the shared online space with my participant, when they hold open the door for me to be with them in their place as I stand on a digital threshold. We will both be “somewhere else” and perhaps our shared places can allow us to feel as if we are just a breath away.

References

Béres, L. (2012) Celtic spirituality and postmodern geography. Journal for
the Study of Spirituality, 2:2, 170-185. https://doi.org/10.1179/jss.2.2.h84032u7246xg776 #paywall

Brown, S. (2006) Tiocfaidh ár lá: introduction to the special issue. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 14:1, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/09652540500511206 #paywall