In a 2018 interview, author Wendell Berry says that Henry County in Kentucky, the agrarian farming area where he grew up, is considered by most to be “no place.” It isn’t a big city or a tourist destination. It lacks the glamour of wealth or development and lies in a forgotten part of the country, the sort of “no place” that young people flee as soon as they can for areas with more opportunity.
That’s why it was so startling when Berry, after making a successful start as a writer and teacher in New York City, moved back to Kentucky in 1964, right back into a forgotten backwater of a town called Port Royal. There, re-integrated into the community in which he was raised, he became a small-time farmer and extremely popular writer. He lives there to this very day.
In the interview, he says, “I don’t know any other place as carefully as I know this place…” The love and knowledge of the place have spoken to him, he remarks. From its particulars, its people, its local customs and idiosyncrasies, he has come to love the entire universe. He didn’t have to become a professional traveler or a tourism blogger to expand his horizons. He didn’t have to abandon his roots for the big city. Through his own place, he learned to value every other place, to respect and honor the beauty of how various people live and shape their own lands and form communities.
It seems to me that, the more frantic we become about the necessity to travel constantly, the less we actually know and love this planet. We become rootless wanderers, victims of wanderlust who constantly move around in an attempt at self-discovery. It doesn’t work, though, because the blur of experiences doesn’t allow enough time to become a part of the place, to dig in and learn to love it for better or worse, and in that place to be challenged and grow and learn who we are.
Travel is, of course, broadening. There’s a reason we enjoy seeing new places, and nothing is more memorable than taking a break from life-as-usual to see new things and immerse in a different culture and environment. Berry did travel and lecture but he always knew where his home was, the place he loved. His point wasn’t that we should never travel but, rather, that if we aren’t able to settle and love one specific place and call it home, then we won’t ever really appreciate any other place.
Responsible Engagement
He speaks about responsible engagement; “No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.” To be committed to a specific place demands something of us, that we contribute to making it better. This creates a relationship with the place, a love for it, and engages us in caring for it. It’s okay to be partial to your place, he says, because this is the key to loving all other places. Living in a small corner of the world makes us attentive to the whole.
Attention to the Local
A person who loves his local place is, by definition, more attuned to the particular habits and creatures of that place. A love for the local resists some of the negative effects of a large, anonymous corporatized and industrialized economy. “By the time I was thirty,” he writes, “I could see that my native place and the life of it, along with my affection for it, was not in favor with the urban-industrial system ...”
His home is rural, small, and backward. He likes it that way. Places like his are practically invisible, but that doesn’t mean they lack value. Berry always thought that, if we slow down and pay careful attention to our place, the chance to live in an “invisible” place is actually an opportunity to appreciate the local.
Community and Identity
Love for a place not only creates a connection to community, but also imparts personal identity. He writes, “If you see the world’s goodness and beauty, and if you love your own place in it, then your love itself will be one of your life’s great rewards.”
We spend so much time dreaming of living somewhere else, as if a location change will solve our personal issues, but this never works. The only way to develop an identity and personality is committing to a place and learning to love it. We uncover our own role within the place and so discover who we are. Commit to building a home in a place, because loving it with all its quirks and flaws is revelatory. It turns out, we can love ourselves, too, with all our quirks and flaws. We don’t need to be somewhere else or someone else.
Commit to building a home in a place, because loving it with all its quirks and flaws is revelatory. It turns out, we can love ourselves, too, with all our quirks and flaws. We don’t need to be somewhere else or someone else.
Spiritual Connection
Berry's love for his place helped him understand that God, too, loves that place. He felt a divine presence in the beauty of the community and land. “Without quite knowing what I was doing at that time,” he writes, “I had entered the way of love and taken up its work.” The spiritual connection he found with God strengthened him to fight for justice for the people and place he loved. “You cannot conserve the land unless you can conserve the people who depend on the land,” he writes. To love a place means committing to its flourishing and, for Berry, it brought out a righteous sense of justice.
Wendell Berry loved his corner of Kentucky. For me, there are places in Missouri that I hope to never leave. When I was young, I was eager to leave Missouri behind. I lived in several different cities over the course of 15 years and learned to appreciate all of those places and the people living in them, but they were never able to displace the place in which I was born. I wonder if I loved all those other places so much because, unbeknownst to myself, I already deeply loved Missouri. I am shaped to it and deeply committed its land and people. Whatever place you have been given, make it your home. Give yourself to it in love and the place will love you in return.
