Quotations About Place That Prompt Creative Action

photo by Amy Lenzo

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“A sacred landscape is not simply a backdrop for action, but rather a place filled with names, associations and memories that link together everything present there. Humans become linked to the rocks, trees, animals, rivers, mountains and these bonds guide future human interaction with that place.”
~ Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments

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“Spaces that are alive have interlinking patterns that appear, not in isolation, but with each other. They are created from living centers. Old and young, the masculine and feminine, aloneness and communal activities must be balanced everywhere. People feel welcomed to stay, not just move through. Living places have solid middles.”
~ Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

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“When you focus on place you do everything differently.”
~ Fred Kent

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“How to use and leverage the presence and power of certain places for accessing the authentic dimension of self in individuals and in communities, is one of the most interesting research questions for the years to come ”
~ Otto Scharmer, Theory U

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“When we visit sacred sites we go there with humility, perform our acts of respect and then see what happens—we surrender to the place rather than try to ‘control’ it.”
~James Swan, Sacred Places, How the Living Earth Seeks our Friendship

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“One place can have “good” patterns in it, and yet be dead…Another place can be without the patterns which apply to it, and yet still be alive.”
~Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

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“We like to think of sanctuary and places of faith as locations where we are protected from the horrors of violence and cruelty, where we will be safe from the profane world beyond the gates or outside the doors…But as Moses discovered, holy ground can also be a place of awe and mystery, where demands are made of us that challenge us deeply.”
~Martin Rowe, Sanctuary, Parabola, winter 2006

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“The home is not the only tame place in a world of adventure, it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.”
~C. K Chesterton

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“Falling in love with a place is like falling in love with a person; once you are in deep it’s best to have a long-term committed relationship, one that requires sacrifice. Commitment implies protecting, nurturing, and defending.”
~Mary Pipher, “In Praise of Hometowns,” in Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the 21st Century.

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“A sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room or a certain hour of the day…a place where you can simply bring forth what you are or what you might be.”
~Joseph Campbell

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“Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.”
~Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Foxes

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“There is something in our automated American soul that cannot abide the dead-end drive; we demand that our scenic roads curve across the landscape in great winding loops, freeing us from the detestable necessity of motoring through the same scene twice.”
~Edward Abbey

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“Wilderness reservations are best viewed as holes and cracks, as “free spaces” or “liberated zones,” in the fabric of domination and self-deception that fuels and shapes our mainstream contemporary culture.”
~Thomas Birch, “The Incarceration of Wildness”

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“We are all in chiasmatic borderlands, liminal areas where new shapes, new kinds of actions and responsibility, are gestating in the world.”
~Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters”

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“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring shall be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
~T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

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“We must now learn what every successful species has learned before us: to live as members of cooperative living communities exquisitely adapted to the microenvironments of our particular place on Earth.”
~David C. Korten, The Great Turning

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“Communities are real places, chosen as objects o love, with particular landscapes, sounds and smells and particular people who live there. Communities are about accountability about what we can and should do for each other.”
~Mary Pipher, “In Praise of Hometowns,” in Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the 21st Century.