Being in a Place > Knowing a Place

Facing the infinite and infinitesimal one step at a time

After completing my “30 Walks in Nature” last summer, I reflected on limits. I had visited only a tiny portion of the city I call home. Indeed, I had seen only a small fraction of “green Louisville,” itself only a part of the larger cityscape. 

Recently, I’d felt this sense of limitation in another way – that I knew dimly even the places I had visited, even teeny-tiny Gnadinger Park. What can we know in a single visit? Perhaps we can appreciate, we can even fathom our sense of appreciation. But do we really know a place until we have spent considerable time in it? Isn’t immersion a prerequisite – necessary but perhaps even that isn’t sufficient for knowledge. Is knowledge even the point? 

This week I returned to the part of “green Louisville” I should know best, where I spent innumerable hours growing up: Locust Grove, home of George Rogers Clark – Revolutionary War and Native American fighter, founder of Louisville, and older brother of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. After the Revolution, George Rogers Clark got drummed out of the service following reports of drunkenness. He moved to Indiana, piling up debts and selling his wartime land grants to pay it off. Failing health caught up with him in the early 1800s. He burned a leg so badly he had it amputated. Finally, he moved in with his sister, Lucy Corghan, and her family at Locust Grove. 

“The place is the saint,” says Josh Schrei, host of The Emerald Podcast, channeling poet and mythologist Sophie Strand. Can we think of Joan of Arc and not imagine France? George Washington and not recall Mount Vernon? Mahatma Gandhi and not bring up India? Nelson Mandela and South Africa? More than saints and heroes —we all become braided within place.

We become one with the place. We dissolve and, for a time, we don’t matter. Our ego, our cares, our ambitions all evaporate into the calm air leisurely encircling this place. 

I became my step. Another. And another. In the step, step, step, knowledge no longer marked my goal. Being subsumed knowledge. Simple being. 

A glorious walk! The sun beamed bright without burning. Green, blue and yellow dominated the landscape, calling me to traverse terrain outside and in. I slipped past the replica Croghan and Clark family cemetery and headed downhill along the fence separating Locust Grove from the neighbors. At the Spring House, I stepped into the door threshold. A large tree threw dark and cool shadow on the entryway – a perfect place to peck at my lunch.

I dove into the surprisingly ample woods – the real reason I came. For two hours, I ambled slowly around, following the narrow but deep dirt path. I circled, turned around, retraced my steps. I stopped to examine felled trees and the fungi disintegrating the arboraceous fibers, playing their appointed role in the circle of death and regeneration. I emerged into sunlight only to instantly dive back into shadow. 

Do I know this place? For a moment, I saw it. A step later, I had changed and it had changed. 

Henry David Thoreau would sit by a pond, keenly watching that one part of it….for the entire day. Again I returned to being as a state incomparably more precious than knowing. We become part of our place – even if only for a lifetime, a decade, a year, a month, a moment. The knowing matters far less than the being, this mystical merging of person and pond, at an infinitesimal point of blue and yellow, where the universe started and the universe will end, when all will be only a single, luminous point again. 

Every step carries us closer to that point.

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