What's Your Design? A Sense of Place

What's your design?  Who is the person that you are today? 
What's your design intent?  Who is the person that you will be tomorrow?

We can define our design by way of our culture, family, education, work, friends, spirituality, leisure activities, sense of place, mind, body and soul.

A Sense of Place

A sense of place is our connection to the land.  We make this connection by what we see; by what we smell; by what we hear; by what we taste; by what we feel; by what we know; and by what we can know.  A sense of place becomes a living and breathing part of us when we become aware that it is there.  It has been with us our entire life.  As a kid did you play: On ballfields, in the woods, in a tree house, on the playgrounds?  As you became older did you: take picnics, go hiking, ride in a boat, cut your grass, paint your house...did you, do you, get in a car, plane, train or bus and go to work?  You've always been out and about the land. 

A sense of place develops when we connect our awareness of the land to our senses and mind.  Do you remember as a kid visiting your relatives on the farm?  Do you remember the smells in the air... of the grass, animals and woods?  Do you remember the 49 Ford parked out behind the chicken coup?  The mouth-watering taste of Aunt Emma's biscuits and gravy?  The whistles from nearby trains?  The smooth and worn down surfaces of Uncle Bob's rocker?  Folks on the farm lived a simple life.  You went back home, back to school and thought about the simple life.  After ten summers of visiting a part of that simple life was a part of you.  A part of Aunt Emma and Uncle Bob's land was inside of you.

Or maybe you lived on a farm and visited with Aunt Anna and Uncle Bill in the city...

A sense of place is embedded in the design of who you are.  You've only to reconnect.  And when you do, you'll be one step closer to creating a sense of place that you will enjoy in the future.

Drink deep of your environment and surroundings today.  Take pictures.  Journal notes on your sense's experience.  Research who and what used to occupy the land you are living on.  Understand that you are an important cog in an eternity of those who've been privileged to use the land.  Care for it, engage in it and leave it a better place for those who will follow you.  To design a sense of place that you will one day look back upon and cherish, is to develop and hone a sense of awareness today.

Comments

[Rosa Say]

In reading this Dave, I immediately recalled the many conversations which surrounded a decision my husband and I had made 17 years ago: We moved to the Big Island of Hawai‘i, away from all family and friends, precisely because we wanted our children to grow up in the Hawai‘i of land-connected values (and not man-created ones.) They would learn the others later, but we very purposely were designing the foundation we hoped they’d grow up with, and be shaped by instead. Even in small Hawai‘i, peacefully dotting the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, the individual islands have their own character and feeling, their own sense of place, and the Big Island was calling to us with hers. To us it has become, and remains, the single best decision we have made in our married lives. We both had wonderful childhoods on O‘ahu (we call it “small kid time” here), however in giving sense of place to our children, it also felt like we got to live it over again, and with them, the two most important people in our lives.