I love discovering a new name for something. This happened recently when I was reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. Macdonald writes about really knowing a plot of land and having specific markers—the wood ants’ nest, the newt pond, “a huge, red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box.” She writes, “naturalists call this a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning.”

As soon as I knew there was a name for intimately knowing a bit of land, I immediately found myself longing for “a local patch.” And then I quickly decided I’d never had a local patch, and not only had I never had one, I’d also never given my kids the opportunity to have one. Yep, that’s where my brain went. Except that’s not true. I’m not a naturalist and my “local patch” may not be like Helen Macdonald’s, but there is a circle of dead and fallen cottonwood trees behind the house I grew up in, and this spot glows with memory and meaning for me. It had a history—I remember my dad telling me he used to play among the trees in that very same spot when he was a boy. In elementary school I tested my strength and my courage and my balance on those trees. And when a friend and I were playing near the trees and became frightened by a new horse rearing her hind legs, neighing and stomping, we ran and hid behind one of those huge trunks, thinking we were invisible. When my husband proposed to me, it was in the snow and the presence of those fallen trees.

And here, now, my kids are making their own local patch—the street corner where my son fell off his bike into the cactus, the irrigation ditch where they catch crawdads and frogs, the tumble of green where strawberries always grow. These landmarks are being etched onto their hearts. Even now, years later, when we pass the street corner with the cactus, my son will mark it, saying, “That’s where I fell off my bike into the cactus.” When we pass the tree where we once saw an owl take flight, without fail one of them will say, “Look, the tree where we saw the owl!”

Yes, we all need the gift of a plot of land to ground us, to mark our wonder, our places of fear and pain, our discoveries, our abundance, our wholeness. I know I long for this. And I think my longing for a local patch is rooted in this question: Will I ever feel truly at home in my body and mind, in my relationships, on this earth? On my cynical or low days, I’d probably say no. But on my lighter days, I can hold both my squirmy, uncomfortable feelings of not belonging as well as the little glimpses of feeling truly settled and whole.

Maybe claiming a local patch is ultimately an act of hope and imagination—that we can and will experience glimpses of coming home to ourselves, our community, our spirits, and our earth. And this claiming also involves paying attention and noticing the spot where we saw a red underwing moth, because it matters. 

So now I pick up a new truth—that we’re all moving toward our truest homes inside the Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being, facing the scariest lies we tell ourselves and the hottest desert sun along the way, holding our longings and feelings of isolation and belonging, and naming our local patches. Yes, together we’re moving, expanding, healing, breathing our way home.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 40.