| This is a tale of placelessness and a longing search for place of (be)longing in the world. It is a tale of turning inward to the bones in seeking to understand my relation to the human and non-human world. This tale unfolds as a series of fragments threaded together with invisible seams, wisps of thought, and re-enacted moments of earth and flesh and bones and breath---fleeting traces of blood memory.; Contemporary worldviews reveal placelessness, disenchantment, and human loss of intimacy with the natural world. This arts-informed inquiry unfolds the nature of transience and a nomadism that brings forth fragmentation, uprootedness, disorientation, and dislocation. Recognizing space as a postmodern version of place, the artist/researcher explores sense of place in the natural world as a lingering, a pause, a dwelling, that honours the primacy of experience, affirms tacit and intuitive dimensions of personal knowledge, and awakens to a porous receptivity by embracing embodied knowing.; The phenomenon of place is reflected upon from existential positionings of outsidedness, as alienated observer, and insidedness, as direct participant, and the guiding perspectives of spatiality, corporeality, temporality, and relationality. Arts-informed, hermeneutic-phenomenological accounts of placeness are presented through embodied aesthetics of poetry, photography, and 'found artifacts' to illuminate moments of immersion in the natural world. These experiences are represented in visual and textual encounters; each fragment suspending a moment of temporality, acts of discovery, and re-enactments of embodiment.; A world-centred view of placeness echoes universal longings to connect and to re-cover intimacy with the natural world. Entering a shifting paradigmal framework that urges re-shaping human/non-human relationships deepens understanding of the participatory and interactive nature of the world, and embodies knowing that humanness is rooted in the soil and is inseparably connected to the earth. This inquiry calls for re-conceiving educational orientations that move beyond autonomous individualism to integration of collective vision. A sense of place is envisioned that engenders an awareness of interdependence and interrelatedness, inspires one to imagine a worldview of connection, and to seek place(s) beyond fragmented postmodern geographies. |
