Where a home is set can evoke a much more powerful response than the home itself. When we
see a hut clinging to a windswept mountainside, a cabin alone on an open plain, or a farm nestled in green valley, it can feel as though the geography of such places could contain our state of mind like a hand in a glove. If we cannot always go to those place that have most meaning for us, then
we can at least bring something of their message indoors.
It is possible to regulate psychology with geography, as American journalis Winifred Gallagher
realized after she bought a house in the woods of upstate New York, simply because it felt like
home, and provided the perfect antidote to her stressful city life. in her book The Power of
Place, she proposes that people who are sluggish and delicate respond to homes that open easily to the elements -- wide open windows and long views. The hypersensitive and allergic gravitate to static, enclosed space, where the air is still and the temperature consistent: courtyards not
hillsides. Being able to observe easily from your home any agitated feature of the landscape - a
marketplace, a waterfall, a main rod - provides a sustaining sense of being part of a larger
scheme, if that is what you feel you need.
The Romantic movement gave us a vision of the wild places of the world as havens, not as sites of fear and reverence. `I live not in myself, but i become/Portion of that around me: and to me/High mountains are a feeling, but the hum/Of human cities torture` wrote Byron in Childe Harold`s pilgrimage. Later, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas found that the wildness of the Boat House at Laugharne, his sea-shaken house/on a breakneck of rock, matched his own wildness. And in her elergy to motherhood, The Blue Jay Sings, Louise Erdrich praises the aptness of her self-sufficient little house in an area of fecund countryside.
Imagining Your Dream Environment
From the place picture, choose the environment you find most congenial and note up to three
key words to describe what makes it attractive yo you. What other setting would you love for your ideal home? Deep inside the woods? surrounded by meadows of garzing horses? Now think of the landscape you find love about them? If mountains thrill you, is it because they make you fell small, or powerful, or detached? Do desert make you fell purifed or lost? Write down the three words that sum up the motions evoked by your favourite place.
You should now have an idea of what is most important to you about your physical environment. Perhaps a view is not as important to you as the lie of the land, the climate, or th density of populaton. Your physical constitution may effect how you feel about this more than you might expect.
