In the Same Place. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland

      A Morning Room

      This volume is devoted to all them that have learned to love place; to them that have sat still long enough to notice themselves outside of themselves.

      And, for Christina and Redmond on the occasion of their marriage. Many blessings!

      —Tom

      “We spend our whole lives in the same place and never leave . . .”

      Charles Wright, “Returned to the Yaak Cabin, I Overhear an Old Greek Song,” in Appalachia

      “Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all, as I believe Frost used to say. It’s like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can’t see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there.

      “If people around you are in favor, that helps poetry to be, to exist. It disappears under disfavor. There are things you know, human things, that depend on commitment; poetry is one of those things. If you analyze it away, it’s gone. It would be like boiling a watch to see what makes it tick.”

      William Stafford,Writing the Australian Crawl

      Introduction

      Sustaining two seemingly opposing ideas at one and the same time is not simply an indicator of the existence of a neo-cortex, it is a keen marker that the thinker is human and a mature human at that. Being able to think locally and non-locally in terms of entities, ideas, states, and such is very high up there on the evolutionary brain scale.

      The developed mind and heart and person—for that matter—can be identified by their ability to sustain complexity. As we grow and develop we are able to do more than one thing at a time and this includes thinking, feeling, hoping and performing. It is just a benchmark of growth.

      I do not want to venture toward what number of chronologic years and or what psycho-social level (i.e., developmental years) are required as a numeric milestone for what it means to be mature. Primarily, because this is a volume of poems on place and not on neural development or even neural linguistics. A volume of poems concerning place.

      Suffice it to say, if you can hold the notion that place has everything to do with meaning, and its opposite—that place has absolutely nothing to do with meaning—as simultaneously possible and true without exclusion, then you could surmise a mature human neo- cortex is your default operating system. And, therefore in kind, if you could hold that meaning has absolutely everything to do with place; and, also that meaning has absolutely nothing to do with place, then blah, blah, blah. . .neo-cortex. . .blah, blah, blah . . .operating system.

      That being said, the concept of locale and or where a thing is, has so much to say about what a thing is. If a thing takes place “here,” there is some sort of residue of the “hereness” of that thing that has smeared itself onto the surface of that thing’s meaning. The same is then true about the “there” in which a thing may have taken place in or not. “Hereness” and ‘thereness” impact a thing’s “suchness.”

      * * *

      There is some real value in finding a locale—a space that we can call the here and now—and fight for it, defend it, and win it over and against all forces that wish to take it and make it “there” or “then.” It gives us the chance to call a thing “mine” or “ours.” The true mistake; however, would be to not acknowledge that “this too shall pass”; most likely, within the twinkling of an eye. We grasp, we gain, we hold, and we lose.

      Things change quickly. When you are very, very close to the center of the change and when you are at a good and healthy distance from the change it may look like the change happens slowly. But, it is purely relative. Because, if you are farther away it looks as if it happens quickly. And, if you are far enough away, it does not even appear that change occurs at all. Such is the mystery of time and place.

      So, “here” and “there,” “now” and “then” are all ways of expressing place (both in time and space). They all make a difference in how the suchness of a thing is and is perceived. It may be the here and now of the earth or spaces on it, but it might also be the here and now of the interior character of who you are.

      Space and time are not just terms and functions of the bigger/larger objects in our lives, but intricately woven into the cells that make up our spleen and the neuro-transmitters that carry our sense of truth and integrity (or some other thing that carries that—which we have not yet figured out how to find or name just yet). The Mercurial and Hermetic principle that everything above operates on similar principals as the things below (inside as well as outside) holds true in this conversation as we might expect.

      We impact where we are—in space and in time. Where we are in space and time impacts us as well. From a distance or a different vantage point, none of this seems true. Close up and at other places all of this seems true. This is what we can sustain when we are growing.

      All of this being said, I suppose the journey this collection is meant to set us on is the journey of exploration to see how we are woven into and among the where and when of who and what we are. Push and test the connections and the spaces in between to see how the one is or is not showing itself to be the other. Get a sense of what influences and in which direction.

      * * *

      When we go back home we can feel a flood of emotion and suchness that makes us feel as if no time has elapsed. We readily pick up old ideas, notions, beliefs and ways of inhabiting our skin. We feel to be our old self. Likewise, when we set out to new places and times in our lives we take pieces of who we have been into those places and that impacts them.

      I think we sense the reality of these ideas in simple ways like how going to the ocean can make us feel different than we do when cooped up in our homes during the snowstorms of winter. Or, we can feel the difference when we stand at the foot of Half-Dome in Yosemite National Park and stare up, as opposed to catching crayfish in the trickle of a stream along the road and under the culvert back home. Place impacts us and we it.

      We need to overlay the idea of time on top of this because we can sense changes in the impact of place when we compare them to other times. We have all felt how small and colloquial our childhood home feels when we are grown up and come back to visit after a long time away. We know how returning to places of college experiences we do not always feel the same as we did when we were there before. Times and places seem to be somehow different then we have held them to be in our memory. Place matters. Time matters. Place impacts us and we it. Time impacts