geography for the soul

The book _Motel Nirvana_ came up in a conversation recently, and I had to get it out again to look for the lines I was trying to quote from it. I think this was one of them. Melanie McGrath, the author, impressed me the first time with her grasp of the inner trips that the desert and its people can take each other on. At this reading, it also fits because I'm moving across my little stretch of the desert once again, finding home in a new old place - Albuquerque's South Valley. A place that certainly has its trip to work on me...

"I have heard it said that people who live in a series of different landscapes or in a series of different cultures are in search of their soul's home...a new environment is not so much a fresh and transcendent geography for the soul as an instrument with which to change the personality. I have proved this to myself by standing on the plain and turning to face the four compass points. At each turn, nature makes a new relationship to both itself and the viewer. Even if that newness seems only to be a different pattern of rock and sky, the scape is irrefutably altered and the brain forced to compensate. One is on the plain still, but at one's feet and eye-line are five quite separate worlds. Each transmutes the personality, however slightly..."

My question was going to be, if travellers to strange new lands are in search of their soul's home, then what are travellers who come back to old homegrounds doing? But this is all the same journey. We can visit strange new lands not for the first time. Like she points out, it's so much about the perspective, and the openness to being altered. But it's also the recognition of what the land is up to - what the earth itself is doing, and has been doing in a place since we were gone. For me, in each direction that I turn, the Valley is making a place for me, a place that might not have been there just six months ago. And I will face and give thanks to each facet of it. And be altered, as it offers...