|
Quotations About
Place That Remind Us to Care
photo by Amy Lenzo
“The complex relationship of people to places has come under increasing scholarly scrutiny in recent years as acute global conditions of exile, displacement, and inflamed borders—to say nothing of struggles by indigenous peoples and cultural minorities for ancestral homelands, land rights, and retention of sacred places—have brought the political question of place into sharp focus. But to date, little attention has been paid to the ethnography of place, to how people actually live in, perceive, and invest with meaning the places they call home.”
~ Steven Feld and Keith H Basso, Sense of Place
.oOo.
“...all space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some
degree of life in it, and that matter/space is more alive
or less alive according to its structure and arrangement.”
~ -Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: The Phenomenon
of Life
.oOo.
“Place as we experience it is not altogether natural.
If it were, it could not play the animating, decisive role
it plays in our collective lives. Place, already cultural
as experienced, insinuates itself into a collectivity, altering
as well as constituting that collectivity. Place become social
because it is already cultural. It is also, and for the same
reason, historical. It is by the mediation of culture that
places gain historical depth.”
~Edward S. Casey, Getting
Back into Place
.oOo.
“All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree
of life in it, and that matter/space is more alive or less
alive according to its structure and arrangement.”
~Christopher
Alexander, The Nature of Order: The Phenomenon of Life
.oOo.
“The memories in things speak reciprocally with people,
where they very earth remembers the imprints of history…the
specific place-names should be spoken aloud upon arriving
at each one. This way you bring alive what happened and still
happens there.”
~Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance
.oOo.
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep
gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
~Frederick Buechner,
Wishful Thinking, a Seeker’s ABC
.oOo.
“We all have three essential places: the place we live,
the place we work, the place we gather for conviviality.”
~Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place
.oOo.
“Every place is given its character by certain patterns
of events that keep on happening there. These patterns are
always interlocked with certain geometric patterns…they may
be dead or alive…when they are dead, they keep us locked
in inner conflict.”
~Christopher Alexander, The Timeless
Way of Building
.oOo.
“Let the site tell you its secrets.”
~Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
.oOo.
“We first design structures, then they design our lives.”
~Winston Churchill
.oOo.
“…sacred geography…concerns the study of those subtle influences
on the surface of the earth and the symbolic forms which
make a particular site especially receptive to the grace
of Heaven. It is this science which is related to the location
of sites for temples, sanctuaries, tombs and initiatic centers
and to the creation of gardens and landscapes… Some of the
Japanese gardens built with knowledge of the principles of
the important traditions science are like an antechamber
opening into the paradisal world.”
~Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
“The Traditional Sciences,” The Unanimous Tradition
.oOo.
“All of the power centers, regardless of their purpose and
function, should be respected.”
~Medicine Grizzlybear Lake
.oOo.
“Human beings are an expression of their landscape.”
~Lawrence Durrell, “Landscape and Character”
|
