Engagement with Place
Developing a relationship with place seems key to encounter with sentient River. In our co-operative inquiry protocol participants agreed to visit their River weekly. But the cycles of inquiry progressed, it became clear that this regular visiting, and knowing that our human co-inquirers were also visiting, was a practice in its own right.
The visits were not taken lightly, as a form of entertainment, but carried a deeper intention. While some participants took time to settle on one place, the overall feeling through the inquiries was that visiting the same place, week in, week out, maybe year in, year out, develops a sense of intimacy and familiarity that can be experienced as mutual. One deepens into the physicality of the place and also the spirit of place.
Andrea writes
I had enjoyed the discovery of more of Tah-la-lu in the Campbell Valley Forest but did not realize how much I was missing that most precious place under the trestle, hidden from first sight, where water meets water in a most expansive breath in and breath out. It is here that the waters move together, the pushing and pulling that so touched me in our first months of becoming cherished companions. I missed her. I missed this place that is now a part of who I am.
There is something about the difference between the new the fresh, the young, the unknown, versus the intimacy that develops over time and maybe feels less passionate. These are very different intimacies. Participants on Living Waters stressed the importance of building up an ongoing relationship over a period, to really stick to something, repeating it again and again, and learn from that process.
For Ľuboš, ‘place’ encompasses the whole of the Melatín Brook in the Czech Republic
Throughout the inquiry I’m trying to always change the practice of encountering my flowing companion. Until now, however, the change was not guided by the previous round of the inquiry, but rather by a general attempt to progressively get to know the brook and let it know me. Perhaps it was inspired by a feeling I have had from the beginning: that the relationship must develop, that I cannot rush; and also that such a serpentine liquid being stretching several kilometres cannot be well known in a day.
In writing his account, Ľuboš also draws on the extended epistemology of co-operative inquiry, using different typefaces for practical, experiential, and presentational inquiry, an experiment in writing which gives added interest to his account.
Jacqueline tells of feeling as if she is making friends with Place and wonders if the feeling is reciprocated
I arrive at what is starting to feel like ‘my spot’. Everything is in full green garb. I greet Place with a thrill that feels like seeing an old friend, wondering if the feeling is all mine, or if some echo of it ripples around the scene.
David finds a particular place only after several cycles of inquiry with the River Fowey on Cornwall
Early on in these inquiries I began exploring River’s many modes, all the way up to her moorland source. I became curious about how a river has many different characters. But latterly I was mostly attending to River where I live on the estuary. And I came to realise that an estuary is a different kind of being.
In contrast, some of you have been faithful to one spot. So now I've changed my practice and spend time every week at one spot, intending to get to know River’s personality where I sit by a bend in the Fowey on the Lanhydrock estate.
Peter’s account of sitting in his place at the confluence of the Rivers Avon and Frome was included in an earlier posting. He later writes in Torn Away, of his shock and distress when this intimately known spot was radically altered in a river flood.
Other accounts of engagement with places may be found as follows