Spiritual connection to land

[Harkonnen]

100%

I was raised in Texas but I always longed for mountains and snow. Now that I’m surrounded by it, I feel more at home than in the inner city.

mm mm mmm something moth with eyes as wings. As American girl you probably know that there is place in New York called Rockaway Beach. Folks like to take long walks there, breathing in the steel-gray gloom. Unlike the famous song by Ramones leads you to presume, the sun hardly ever shines at Rockaway Beach. But do not blame the sun. Be thankful to the clouds for the beautiful moment by the sea in complete solitude. The sea merges in with the sky to form one steel-gray wall. It is hard to see where one starts and the other ends. It storms in as one distorted and ambient wall of mass, that rolls over you like a harbinger of some great flood. It grabs soul and washes it away. It is not words or not even poetry. It is music; it does not explain, it is. Pure and raw emotion. Perhaps you like the honesty of music? It has been said: of that of which you can not speak of, you must remain silent. Or just music? As substitute maybe. And please do not try to understand it. Please do not like music. Abandon it altogether. Hate it. Like different sounds produced by different animals, birds, trees, fields of corn, wind and the ocean. Either by themselves or in conjunction. Going against common sense the feeling of liking music, in most cases, has very little to do with music itself. It is rather that music seems to act as a temporary filler to a inner void. In any case, it is in actuality more of a distortion leading you away from your inner self, than any kind of vortex pulling to inner depths. At night it is more frightening to listen to music, because the eyes do not see. At night it is more lovely to listen to music, because the eyes do not see. At night you can hear the music better, because the eyes do not see. At night you can not run away from music, because the eyes do not see. You can only clumsyly wobble away like drunken sailor or Walkind Dead person. It is similar to some more carnal portions of human existence, it is the search for the right frequency. It is trigger of a revolver that ignites the machinery, and end result is a flame. And there is no flame without what, and no what without a what. Fire? Spirit? In ancient times the blacksmiths were thought to be the big brother's of the shamans, and their forges were like wombs. The air blowing in to a forge, was enhanced breathing, the language of the carnal. And the sound of a gun firing is the exclamation mark to my point.

[Aila]

Two differing ways to relate to the land:

[Roy]

100% agree! I love commieblocks, always been fascinated with them and wan ted to live in them

Meanwhile I've always hated them.

[Aila]

Two differing ways to relate to the land

continued:

[Perunovsin]

100% agree! I love commieblocks, always been fascinated with them and wan ted to live in them

Yes, naturally you do, as chickens belong in a chicken coop, hehe

[Perunovsin]

Commieblocks are ugly as well, Hungary was more beautiful before the commies destroyed the traditionally landscape with this ugly russian architecture. Most Hungary but especially the Alföld is exploited, soulless and boring.
I prefer such places where there are huge and wild forests, hills, old castles and medieval streets, you can feel the deep history and romance in these places. Unlike in Alföld what looked like a tortured land.

I was in Budapest once on a football game, we rented an apartment with fucking 5 meter ceilings and baroque-type pastel-colored and gold furniture for basically nothing, love the prices and architecture, it was amazing

[Grace O'Malley]

Do you believe in it?

Family members of mine (who aren't 'spiritual' types) have often said they felt something when they visited certain historical battlefields in Europe, and more broadly parts of England/Ireland when they've been there. Certain landscapes of the British Isles are also evocative for me. By contrast I've been struck by a lack of any spiritual connection to the Australian landscape/countryside. Beyond the sights and smells I'm accustomed to and feel like home, from my perspective it feels as though the land is completely spiritually empty, as though nobody ever lived here before Whites, despite that I know it's been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. I suppose Aborigines would feel differently towards it (if they have any complex emotions), so if this spiritual connection to land exists, it's very much ethnic/ancestral based, some kind of ancestral memory perhaps.

What do you think?

Yes I understand completely what you are saying. Although I love Australia I always feel a stranger in a strange land when in the bush and also with the heat it is something you never get used to. In Ireland I feel a deep connection to the countryside. A relative from the US used to kiss the ground (like the Pope ) when they landed in Ireland. When you are in the land of your ancestors many people feel a strong spiritual connection which I think is hardwired into your bones. When you go to someplace like Newgrange it is something that is hard to explain. It is awe inspiring.

One thing which is amazing about Australia is the wide open skies. The skies at night are so bright and clear. In Ireland the skies are always low and full of clouds so you don't have those big skies that you have here.

[rothaer]

Yes, to me there is a spiritual connection to land. I want to make clear that it's not about anything supernatural.

It is mostly caused by knowledge and consciousness. It's about ancestry, history and prehistory. I do ancestry research and I basically try to visit every ancestral location at least once in my life. I then consciously even kind of "inhalate" all characteristics and store them in my memory. I watch the landscape, the soil, the smell, the microclimate, the buildings (if they are so old that my ancestors may have seen them too), the inhabitants (that can be assumed to be distant blood relatives) and where that location is placed on the map and what was the historical, political and settlement background. In some landscapes I have ancestry from a couple of villages and in some even kind of from 20 villages. I then know that I'm (partly) really from there and that my ancestors have seen the same hills, mountains, creeks etc.

It's an incredible feeling if I found out a new ancestral place where an ancestor hailed from and I then for the first time in my life visit that location. I then think for myself, hey, it was 350 years ago when "I" left and was here last time and dear folks, I'm actually back today.

A funny anekdote: When a best friend of mine once came in one of these more narrow ancestral regions of mine (he didn't know that context) and told me that he had driven through there, I told him: Wtf, that are my ancestral villages, you can not just drive there without asking or even telling me in advance! What about if I would just enter your house without asking?

We laughed and that was not serious, ofc, but I really had such feelings(!).

[rothaer]

(...)

Another time I had a strong feeling of alienness to the land. I was just once in America and that was in Montreal.

I was aware of that every tree, every grass, every ant, every bird, every mushroom, in short: every living being in the nature (but cultivated crops and animals) were completely alien to me (that now for the first time put my feet on that ground) and all my ancestors for 100,000s of years. And to see all that people in Montreal, knowing that they - except the Native Americans - have no deeper connection to that land and all that living nature, was a very strange feeling.

I imagine that my ancestors (and also their's) the last 10,000 years will in some way also evolutionary have been used to and adepted to the flora and fauna in Europe, which includes the thousands of sorts of funghi and bacteria in the soils and at the plants. I know that the flora in America is resembling and also evolutionary related from hundreds of millions of years ago, but quite nothing is really the same.

I thought: Nobody sees it at a first glance, but this city could as well have been a colony on another planet.

[Creoda]

Yes I understand completely what you are saying. Although I love Australia I always feel a stranger in a strange land when in the bush and also with the heat it is something you never get used to. In Ireland I feel a deep connection to the countryside. A relative from the US used to kiss the ground (like the Pope ) when they landed in Ireland. When you are in the land of your ancestors many people feel a strong spiritual connection which I think is hardwired into your bones. When you go to someplace like Newgrange it is something that is hard to explain. It is awe inspiring.

One thing which is amazing about Australia is the wide open skies. The skies at night are so bright and clear. In Ireland the skies are always low and full of clouds so you don't have those big skies that you have here.

Very true about the difference in the skies. Those low, cloudy, almost brooding skies of Ireland are extremely evocative, sounds corny but I know instinctively that's the landscape I belong to, it's not even about aesthetic attraction. I walk around the Australian countryside a lot, and even though it's homely/familiar in one sense, you do always feel a stranger deep down.

It's funny but we always had to read that Dorothea Mackellar poem at school, and I could never relate to it. I thought how the hell could you love a brown country?! It seemed perverse, even though I can understand the sentiment/reasoning of it now. I wonder how much of it is genuine or just nationalism. Maybe it takes just a few generations of being on the land to feel differently.

My Country - Dorothea Mackellar, 1908

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold –
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.