a second post in our occasional bog

Some reflections on ‘Place’ at the turn of the year…

Last year, 2020, in the later months, after half a year of living with pandemic, I discovered a new word. Kith. I say ‘discovered’ because although I had known the word for years, I had for all that time mistaken its meaning. ‘Kith and kin’ had meant to me something like ‘family and friends’, and indeed that is how it has come to be used. In fact, ‘kith’, I discovered, is not about people, but about place.

Kith is the home ground beneath your feet, the place of your family and your birth, the land you know as home. In 2020, the original sense of kith - of land and home - appealed to me.

It appealed strongly, and I wasn’t sure why. At about the time of this discovery, I was finding my imagination often drawn to green fields and drystone walls. Born in London (within the sound of Bow Bells, in fact) and living an urban life here in Chester, this rural scene is not my kith. But it felt more visceral than that – something in my bones, my blood, my soul was at home in this setting, and I found it consoling.

I had spent a rare time away from home for a July week, when such things were allowed though I did it with much caution. The highlight of this week, for me, was a walk in evening light after a grey rainy day cleared, across such fields with their sheep and drystone. A deer ran through the field just before us, then leapt over a wall into woodland. That evening – or more precisely, that place – has stayed vivid in my imagination as a standout moment in a year where monotony has loomed large. Perhaps that is why, later, when I heard of kith, it resonated.

My experience in that place, and my love of it since, and the discovery of kith have all led me to realise that the land is my home. Not ‘My heart is in the Dales’, but more than that: I am of the earth and all that is in it. Without the enforced way of living in 2020, I may not have so readily come to this realisation. In another year, a field walk may not have been such a highlight. In other years I have never spent so much time in my small garden, or tending to it, and there were times last Spring when nature seemed acutely vivid there. I have never heard such birdsong, nor so many people talking about birdsong. And my experience of caring for my small plot of the natural world in a time of pandemic brought home to me what it means to care for the planet, and what happens when we don’t. These were things I ‘knew’ already, but I really learnt them by living them.

Just as my relationship with the land, our world, our planet, changed in 2020, so too my relationship with ‘place’. I have never spent so much time in one place. Staying put has been a challenge, even for one who is not a natural adventurer. I have had to learn to be satisfied with the place where I am, because I can’t go anywhere else. I’ve been helped in this by the art of noticing what’s good. Noticing the small things. The things to be thankful for, here in this place. Today it’s the pattern and texture of a favourite cushion; yesterday it was the garden step; tomorrow it will be... who knows? If I remind myself to look with open eyes, to open my senses, I open myself to the possibility of surprise, wonder, joy.

This is good for the soul. Place can heal, if we open ourselves to its gifts. At the turn of the year, I was reading ‘H is for Hawk’ by Helen Macdonald, a telling of how training a hawk – Mabel – gave shape and process to her grief after her father’s death. Her bereavement is a time of profound wrenching sadness, loss, life-changing. This autobiographical account, an acclaimed prize-winning bestseller, is also a homage to place: the fields and woods, the hedgerows, the sky, a landscape in all its changing seasons. Reading this at the heart of winter gave me the beauty, the presence, of landscape and the land, and all the details of it – and it was life-giving.

Towards the end, she writes of how – like she and Mabel out flying - we build our own landscape by navigation: ‘a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning.’ I love that. I love that we make somewhere our own place by being there over time, by living in it and with it. Not perhaps a native place, but still a kind of kith in that it’s where we feel at home.

With ‘place’ capturing my attention, and sinking deeper into my heart and soul, I heard another story straddling the turn of the year. In 2020 – 21, the story of the nativity seemed to me to be a story of displacement: an expectant couple travelling from home by state decree; shepherds leaving the fields where they live; magi from afar; a refugee family fleeing to another land. A manger for a bed. God on earth, at our mercy and who will die in love for us. For all our staying put this year, we have been displaced – removed from what was familiar and challenged by something different. The nativity story shows us that God is born into this displacement, and dwelt amongst us, sharing our life on earth to show us our true place of life with God. God as kith, perhaps – for ‘in God we live, and move, and have our being’.

In his great work ‘The Four Quartets’, twentieth-century poet TS Eliot says this:

‘We will not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.’

In this first month of 2021, I hope for a new year. May I know afresh – as if ‘for the first time’ - the land, home, healing, God. Come the Spring, may I wake up. This year, coming through this pandemic, may I know the deep consolation of Place.