This is my second response to the weekly prompt for the Seeds of Radical Renewal course offered by Emergence Magazine. The first can be found here. We were asked to respond to an essay by filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, describing in harrowing detail her family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and the false promises of the American Dream. To say it is a powerful story is an understatement, and even attempting to respond to it feels in some way like I’m cheapening it.
I really struggled in college. I wasn’t even sure I would graduate. Not because of the coursework or poor grades but because of something much more fundamental: what was the point? A feeling had been building throughout high school, a sense that, like Alison Gopnik says, “what schools do best is teach children how to go to school.” By the time I got to college the feeling that the only skill I actually possessed was how to be good at school became too intense to ignore.
In an attempt to shake the feeling that everything I was doing was pointless, I changed my major a few times. It was a paltry effort to find meaning in what I was doing and where I was, but it never really helped—it was just moving the furniture around, as it were. Changing majors couldn’t address the fundamental problem I was experiencing. The issue wasn’t that I was pursuing the wrong field, it was that every field was cordoned off from everything else, isolated and separated from its environment, the way that a field of wheat or corn or soybeans is unnaturally disconnected from its surrounds while also requiring resources from elsewhere in order to artificially cultivate only one crop.
Most people commuted to and from campus each day, myself included. We all drove from the surrounding suburbs through the “bad parts” of town to reach the cultivated oasis in a desert of rust. The campus itself was so out of place: abandoned houses and businesses, the ruins of a collapsed steel industry, surrounded it on every side. Walking just a few steps away from the manicured lawns you were confronted with a very different kind of place and a very different kind of people.
The expectation of my peers and professors was that I would give myself completely not just to my studies, but to that place: to become a member of that community and join them in their walled gardens and stone towers. I was tempted. The promise of belonging was hard to resist. But it wasn’t only an offer of community and belonging, but of meaning and purpose as well, something I so desperately wanted.
In her essay for Emergence Magazine, Kalyanee Mam reflects on her family’s escape from genocide and the displacement she felt, not just after fleeing but also in pursuing an education in America:
I realize that in this society I do not feel whole, nor do I feel I am part of a greater whole. I feel I must constantly adjust, fit in, and become someone better—or risk grave consequences.
Kalyanee Mam
I felt similarly, even if my circumstances were much, much less severe, almost to be insignificant in comparison. Yet, there is something that connects my experience to hers, a feeling that resonates: a sense that I had to adopt an identity and a way of being in the world without care for the place through which it moved.
She describes feeling like she needed to adopt an identity rooted in a place that is, paradoxically, devoid of place. Education was, her father believed, the path to belonging to this new place, America: a place unrooted and without foundation. The American identity her father wanted for her, and all the things that go along with it, is an identity without place. It takes up space and uproots everything it touches without itself being rooted in a place. Being an American meant adopting a placeless identity where:
Everything belongs to me; yet I belong to nothing. This was the land to which my family immigrated.
Kalyanee Mam
My sense that it wasn’t worth finishing my degree came from a similar realization, that I was being asked to adopt a way of being and sense of self that was deracinated and detached from any specific place. To feel like I belonged with those people in that place, no matter what major I pursued, would mean forcing myself to be comfortable living an unrooted life. And feeling like I wasn’t in the right place was directly connected to feeling like finishing my degree was meaningless or pointless.
There were two components to that feeling of pointlessness: one was that I didn’t belong with these people; somehow these people, this place, was not for me. The second, related to the first, was a sense that there were much more important things to attend to than attending class every day, things that seemed to go unnoticed by most of my peers. Both of these combined to give me a sense not just of meaninglessness—that there was no point in continuing my education because it didn’t matter—but also of placelessness.
I’ve written before about growing up divided from my peers and myself, an experience directly connected to a life lived caring for my brother. But what I am starting to realize, especially as I reflect on these experiences and any similarities to Kalyanee’s, is that my relationship with my brother roots me to this place. That relationship puts the earth beneath my feet, builds a foundation upon the landscape in which we find ourselves, and establishes a connection between myself and my environment.
For lots of complicated reasons my brother is necessarily rooted to this place we both call home—as rooted and immovable as the enormous maple, oak, and sycamore trees we walk under on our walks. Caring for him has, without even realizing it, established and strengthened my roots to this place. Which is to say, being rooted to him has rooted me to place. I felt that most acutely when I briefly lived away from him and this place. I longed for this place: the glacial ravines and open meadows heavy with wet snow, the cidery smell of rotting apples and decaying leaves in early autumn, the deafening buzz of the cicadas in the summer, and even the rows of corn and soybeans.
But what I missed most about living here was the meaning I found in all of these things.
You have a unique ecological role, a singular way you can serve and nurture the web of life either directly or through your role in human society. You have a specific way of belonging to the biosphere, as unique as that of any birch, bear, or beaver pond. What makes you the individual you are is not your autonomy but your interdependent and communal relationship with everything else in nature.
Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul
The feeling I had in college, like Kaylanee, was that I was being asked to adopt an identity of placelessness. It was an environment that intentionally severed its relationship to its place, both the human and the other-than-human people of that place. My sense that college wasn’t worth finishing, that it was a meaningless pursuit, was directly connected to feeling like I didn’t belong there. That is, being rooted to a particular place, part of the web of life there, is what generates meaning and purpose—they emerge from place.
What I mean by place is similar to what ecologists mean by niche, which refers to the position or function of an organism within a community of plants and animals. A niche consists of a set of relationships with other creatures and with the land and sky and the waters. It’s a particular node in a living web. But in the case of the human soul, a niche is highly differentiated both psychologically and ecologically.
Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul
Part of what I was missing in my college experience was a niche—something that couldn’t be created in a placeless environment but only in a living relationship and connection to a particular ecosystem and its inhabitants. My feeling that it was pointless to continue the degree was a reaction, in part, to the loss of that other-than-human community. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was largely through my brother that I came to know and relate to my place—our place—and thus to discover that I was looking for meaning, purpose, and belonging in all the wrong places.
Not only did I finish my degree, I went back for a master’s degree a few years later. Despite the feeling of placelessness desperation led me back to that familiar if meaningless place. This time, however, I was more worthily employed than I had been previously: the summer before graduate school started I, for the first time, began taking care of my brother as a paid caregiver, becoming employed by the agency that cared for him. I had of course helped to take care of him throughout his life, but never in this capacity.
Rather than hang around campus and spend time with other students or faculty after class I raced across town to begin my shift caring for my brother. This double life, teaching and taking classes in the mornings and afternoons, and caring for my brother in the evenings and weekends, was not easy to maintain. But there was one ritual we created that not only made it easier for me to attempt to go to school and take care of him simultaneously, but one that strengthened our relationship with each other and with the other-than-human creatures of the land and sky and waters.
Walking on a paved rail-to-trail with my brother might seem an odd place to connect with this place around us, but it’s one of the only places out of doors that both him and I can go together, him in his wheelchair and me pushing. Unexpectedly, it’s where most of my revelations and bodily experiences of rootedness have taken place, at least in recent years. It’s remarkable what we have seen and experienced together on those paths: wild blackberries and raspberries growing in disturbed areas alongside the trail, deer and turkey foraging in the understory, countless songbirds in meadows and fields, owls and hawks perched in beech trees waiting and watching, salamanders and frogs near the damp and marshier places, enormous snapping turtles warming themselves on the blacktop, and even a periodical brood of cicadas. Most recently I was plucking ripe cherries from the black cherry trees that were drooping overhead and puckering from their astringence while collecting black walnuts and shagbark hickory nuts.
This ritual path we walk is literally on the margins, a liminal path between the human and more-than-human. It is a path we have walked together for longer than I can remember. This is the place we both belong, a place bursting with meaning. But it is also a fragile place, as all borderlands are. It is constantly under threat of annihilation and development. These spaces are hard to find where I live, constantly encroached upon by those wishing to remove any sense of place from them. Perhaps it’s because those people, not unlike me at one time, feel unmoored and lost in a placeless world.
If it weren’t for my brother, and his rootedness to this place, I may still feel that way.