Dear Reader,
Every inch of Earth has its own story, though most will never be told. Wordsworth pauses at a heap of stones and says it matters. How beautiful a pause is that? Because his intent is not to tell us what happened there, but because it has been.
We notice only what has a name, a history book entry, essentially. But just imagine, Earth does not keep history in events, but it keeps it in places. It has recorded all these without language.
Lives have come and gone, and this place on Earth, the exact space beneath your feet, remembers, even if no human does. What is most breathtaking is not that stories are forgotten, but that somebody or something has lived them fully at the very same place or coordinates you are right now.
Throughout the history of our planet, maybe a dog died here, a child was born here, a couple fought here, some vow was spoken in this very air, at this very place you are right now. The ground beneath your feet, wherever you sit reading this, has had some fulfilling moments.
Just imagine if we had a chance to witness or experience the layered invisible dramas that happened at this place across time. A time lapse of countless others who have passed through or lived in this exact space where you are sitting right now.
Just imagine the archive! We daily walk through these archives. It can never be full, but just those fragments with no indexes or retrieval mechanism. The archive of memories.
What is haunting is, we might not exactly retrieve the memory, but sometimes we can only sense them. Sometimes an old wall, some tree, some bench - sometimes you sense it has an essence older than your memory. Nothing might happen there today, but it has seen centuries of movement happen there.
This, to me, is the true poetry of place: the lives that came before.
Yet unless a story is told, it vanishes into the wind, like Wordsworth said.
Wordsworth is indeed right! A single heap of stones, when we notice and give a voice to, becomes something more than just stones. He has carved out human presence from a heap of stones. If that is not told, the stones are just stones, muted. But with the story, they belong to a memory, someone’s memory. One of our ancestors memory.
Earth or nature has never given us something permanently, but the way we have communicated over centuries, through stories, they have given us permanence.
So, wherever you are, reading this, pause for a moment, and look around you once. That very place has seen other lives pass and go. Their voices are gone, you do not know their names, their stories, but this space still holds them as a memory. All of a sudden, it does not make me feel alone, because I am part of the long memory of presences.
Yours in thought,
Yana 🤎