Place-Making

Place-Making: "Anthropologist Keith Basso describes place-making as a work of "retrospective world-building" that enables a person or community to see a place in all its richness and complexity and hold that place in the imagination."(1)

'"places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, or musings on who one might become. And that is not all. Place-based thoughts about the self lead commonly to the thoughts of other things - other places, other people, other times, whole networks of associations that ramify unaccountably within the expanding spheres of awareness that they themselves engender."4 This is, I believe, a lucid description of how contemplative awareness, rooted in a sense of place, gradually comes into being. It is not unlike what the early Christian monks described as the work of rumination, that long, thoughtful chewing-over of experience aimed at helping to surface in the soul the deep significance of that experience.'(1)

"It seems important to note that even as Thomas Merton was learning to pay attention to the geographical and ecological particularity of Gethsemani, he was also feeling the impact of the work of place-making on his inner life, his imagination, and his memory. A noticeable wave of memories, dreams, and reflections from the late summer and autumn of 1961 reveals Merton to be poised on a knife's edge, looking back toward where he had come from and forward toward a still-unknown future. Place became the language for negotiating this complex transition."(1)

Bibliography:

(1) Burton-Christie, Douglas. "Place-Making as Contemplative Practice - Page 2 | Anglican Theological Review." Find Articles at BNET | News Articles, Magazine Back Issues & Reference Articles on All Topics. Web. 03 Dec. 2010. .

I chose the term: "place-making" because this is exactly what happens to me whenever I find a new house. I learned something new about myself and what attracts me to these abandoned houses. I always think about the past and the future when walking through the houses.