It’s hard to believe that it’s been seventeen years this month since I came to the beautiful mountain town where I live. A teaching job brought me to this gorgeous land of enchanting mountains, wandering trails, captivating wildflowers, melodious streams, and above all, a unique people. After living here for several years, I left once so that I could find a place where I could afford to buy a home, only to return two years later to the place that truly felt like home.
Unlike the students that I teach, I didn’t have the opportunity to grow up spending my winters skiing these stunning peaks, camping in the stark Utah deserts during the springs, or passing the summers wandering the mountains and rafting the rivers and biking the trails. I grew up in cities of both the midwest and Colorado’s Front Range. Once I reached Colorado’s Western Slope for college and became acquainted with its small-town mountain life, I knew I was home. For me, this is a FOUND PLACE–one I journeyed to and made a life in, like many others.
As a former history major, I’ve often been fascinated by the theme that people shape places, and places shape people. I see it in the beautiful sun-etched lines, tanned wrinkles, toned bodies, and large smiles of the people here. I see it in my former students who wander far, have a passion for travel and adventure and the outdoors, who live in other places for a time, but who often find their way back home. The FOUNDATIONAL PLACES that gave them roots also provided them with wings.
For me, when I see the big rivers and lakes of the midwest, the colors of the hardwoods in the fall, or walk or drive through a cornfield like those of Iowa where my grandparents once farmed, sweet memories wash over me and take me back to the innocence of childhood. Fog reminds me of driving through the bluffs on the way to my other grandmother’s home in southwestern Wisconsin, which sat on a hill where there was a small orchard. My siblings and I would walk through a screened in back porch where my grandfather was usually smoking his pipe to find my grandmother at work in the kitchen.
Places that have stretched, shaped and enlightened us can also be NOSTALGIC PLACES. I lived in Puerto Rico for a short time on a couple different occasions, and then taught English and served as a missionary in the Dominican Republic for a little over a year. Years later, I spent a summer in Costa Rica. These experiences gave me a great love for Latin America and its people, the Spanish language, and the ocean. They were also some of the most refining years of my life, for I was being reshaped by different places and people, but stretched in ways that redefined me.
And then there are places of IMAGINING AND WONDERING, places that call a deep longing within us that we often can’t quite name or identify. I’ve also been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to travel to Spain on a few occasions and cannot begin to express how much I love this country. I’ve only ever been for several days at a time with a group of students, but each time, it has felt as if I’m made to be there. Its deep layers of history, the beauty of its people and architecture and geography, the amazing food and the gorgeous language–they’re all so captivating. Returning there this summer with students nourished my soul in ways I can hardly express.
We all have those places that captivate and inspire us. Perhaps it’s home–perhaps it’s somewhere new, but may we let ourselves be continually shaped by the beauty around us, and may we all find ways to contribute to that beauty. As the great author Wendell Berry says, “I am always surprised, whenever I look back on times I have known to be worrisome or troublesome or hard, to discover that I have never been out of the presence of peace and beauty, for here I have been always in the world itself.”
SparrowSong 