The DNA of places
I have been lucky enough to visit some of the most fantastic places on earth. But whether it was the desert or a rain forest, I got to visit these places. I did not get to know them.
There is a hilltop clearing in back of an old farmhouse where the sky opens up and birds play in the wind currents. It is up in the wooded hills and you must make your own path to get there. Then my internal compass encoded and I no longer consciously needed to look for markers. Emerging from the trees, the valley opened like a blanket that had been pulled back. It was a small outcropping, a bald spot at the top of the hill. It gives me a sense of belonging.
There is a point that juts out into a lake where the water glistens at sunrise and sunset. The moonlight on the water seems to know this place and shows you a path on cloudless nights, when the moon is strong. This place embraced me.
There was a house by the highway, just north of a creek that flooded. Its windows looked out over the land that the creek claimed with a marsh; where the hum of traffic harmonized with the chirping of crickets. I would sometimes dream there.
Any place can feel like home, for a while.
Places speak to me. They invite me to stay. They are far more consistent than people. Sometimes people want to see you and sometimes they turn you away. A wanderer learns the places almost always ask you to stay. The ones that can heal you and share your joy. The ones where you blend in. They are part of our memory but they are steady as rock.
I wonder about when my feelings seem to come from outside of me. They are seldom intruders and sometimes just need to visit. Plants and trees are like that. They cannot come to you but they need you to come to them. Maybe it is simply a need for connection. Maybe they recognize something in you that has touched them. Maybe they are messengers through time. Is that related to what we call de ja vu?
The other day I thought that perhaps they are forms of reincarnation. Maybe ancestral instincts are manifestations of the reincarnations that we are. I don’t believe in popular reincarnation where everybody gets to be Cleopatra or Alexander the Great. But maybe some lives have been barren and we stuff their reincarnations so deep that they can never surface.
When the feel in the air or the light filtering to the street embraces you like a homecoming, and you have never been to that place before and you have this one time to meld with it. When this one time, place, or creature connects with you and both ingest like sustenance, something special happens. Something deep in you responds. What is that instant?
Sometimes I think it is in my DNA. I wish I knew more about the nature of DNA. I studied its effect on learning for years. But it was moving too fast and changing into its components, like the atom or fleeting love.
Chromatin has my interest today. It is a substance consisting of DNA and protein. It is part of our chromosomes. Is it the dwelling of our ancestors? Scientific articles say that they are essential in maintaining the function of memory cells throughout the life of the organism. Is it possible that they go further? Do they speak to generations yet to come through their connections? Is it an expression of reincarnation?
That all sounds so farfetched. It is like a desire for eternity.
Places are relatives but different because the life of the organism is undetermined. It is more of an ecosystem than creatures appear to be, but that is only on the surface of things. In some realities, creatures are all echo systems. The purpose of the system is survival. Metamorphosis comes into the picture. A place can be reborn, and I guess so can a person. A place can remember who it was and so can a person. But it cannot be proven; it is only sensed.
Our memories are also in our senses. All of them can transport us through time and distance. Sensory memory. Isn’t it clearly transported in other creatures who have the innate desire to migrate to a specific place they have never been? A part of them may have been there before. I like to think that it happens with plants and trees too. How does it look in people?
If everything is connected, mustn’t science connect with spirituality? Mustn’t conscience connect with the soul? Do they all connect with the senses? May they all not connect through generations?
Some things are so primitive that they are complex. Does the nature of the primitive embrace complexity and simplicity?
Does science not reveal the microscopic structure and megascopic structure to be related? Or is it just our perceiving the surface of things more closely and from farther away than ever?
My chromosomes have taken a detour with me; they’re haven’t gone anywhere. Unless there is some other way to pass along my chromatin? To become part of what appears to be the fiber…
When I reach out for these answers, I am met with only the sense of be here now. Simplicity and complexity without a care for forever. The rest will work itself out.
There have been places that I have travelled where I have felt strangely at home, although I have never been to the place before. England was one such place. I had never been to England before but when I visited, everything seemed just as it should be and I felt that I was where I belonged. Did the fact that my ancestry came from this land have anything to do with this feeling? It could be that I have read so much about England that I was familiar, but I did not have this sense of belonging in Greece and I have read as much about their culture and literature.
I know that this is a common experience but the reason for it intrigues me. I sometimes do not feel this way in my own country. Florida is a place that I have visited since boyhood and yet it holds no such feeling for me. The same is true in California or New Mexico. I am supposed to feel this way in Massachusetts, but I do not. I am convinced that some places do have a genetic effect on me.