How Do You Learn to Be in Place?

A year-long course in place-making.

When I was speaking at Berry College a couple of weeks ago, a young person in the front row raised their hand and asked me a question I've never been asked.

How do you learn to be in place?

For all of my writing life I have been studying place and sense of place and spirit of place. How to even begin to answer this student’s question?

I thought about it, and I decided to do something.

A few weeks ago students at Berry College invited me to see their montane longleaf restoration project. They wanted to know more about place.

I am offering a year-long course in place-making called JOURNEY IN PLACE, starting January 2024, all online. It is not a Live via Zoom class where you have to be present. It is correspondence course with an occasional meetup that is entirely optional.

What you get—

• weekly explorations in your inbox, arriving on Thursdays for 52 weeks

• a tiny essay on some aspect of place

• a feet-on-the-ground exercise

• a writing prompt

• an occasional offering of a photograph or piece of writing from someone enrolled in the course.

• an occasional recipe involving a foraged food or medicine.

• handouts and worksheets.

• reading lists.

• encouragement to get outside more.

• an invitation to and a seat in all “Journey In Place” virtual lectures, conversations, and discussions that happen during the year.

That Is Not All!

At the end of 2024 you will be the first to receive free of charge (not even shipping) a paperback book that compiles all the weekly explorations into a manual for getting to know a place, falling in love with a place, and living in place.

What it costs—

Tuition is a paid subscription to this newsletter, which is $9/month, or a total of $108.

Or you can choose to pay a one-time amount of $99 for the entire year.

The fact that you’re reading this likely means that you’re a subscriber already to TRACKLESS WILD. If you’re a paid subscriber, then you’re all set. The explorations will arrive to you via email or the web app.

If you are not yet a paid subscriber and would like the year-long course, simply change your subscription. Paying by the month or by the year is fine.

We don’t lead lives of “quiet desperation,” as Thoreau claimed. We lead lives of relentless separation – comings and goings, airport embraces, loneliness, locked doors, notes left by the phone. And the deepest of all those divides is the one that separates us from the places we inhabit.

Kathleen Dean Moore, in an interview with Derrick Jensen

Placelessness shows up in us as a kind of homelessness. As human beings, we are made of places. We are meant to experience living in a human body in a landscape, to deeply know the earth’s cycles, to live within those cycles.

• Become a scholar of your place.

• Deepen your relationship to your place.

• Find a sense of belonging.

• Locate the place where your heart intersects with your landscape.

• Build more meaning into your life.

• Strengthen the fabric of life around you.

• Find a support network in the earth itself.

• Get every edition of my newsletter.

What if you live in a city?

Most of my personal sensibilities are directed to a landscape that includes nature. However, most people don’t live in the rural. I will make a directed effort to think about place as the built environment of an urban landscape. I hope you sign up. You’ll be able to help me with this.

Should you wait until Dec. 31 to register?

No. Sign up now. Anyone who subscribes to TRACKLESS WILD between now and the end of this year will be covered for the entire course. I will extend subscriptions made now until Dec. 31, 2024.

Other questions?

Feel free to ask me anything in the Comments Section, and I will do my best to answer.

If you’d like to deepen your relationship to your place and create a support network for yourself that is the fabric of life itself, I invite you to join JOURNEY IN PLACE: A Year-Long Course in Place-Making.