PLACES

A location is a location forever, as long as the planet exists.  But a place is a place only for a precious short time.

Locations simply exist, but each place has been created, by God or nature or humanity or all of them working together.  A place exemplifies influences and individuality.  It is not simply a spot on the global grid.  Each place is built upon a location, but it is distinct in time as well as space.  It is one of a kind, fleeting. 

Location plus time set the limits of a place, but the wonders which make it unique are its defining characteristics.

A location may be a forest one year, a home or office or school in another year, and later a highway or an art museum or an airport.  Someday in the future, it may be a forest again, or a playground, or a desert, or a stadium, or the bottom of a lake.  Same location, different places. 

A place is as unique and wonderful as a personality.  It exists once, for a limited time, never to be repeated.  It is a magnificent, unique, and perishable spot in eternity.

My life has changed with the years, and the places I have known also have changed.  Some have vanished like a mist at midmorning.  Some are still the same old places I have loved.  With sorrow, I realize they won’t stay the same forever.



Courtesy http://www.nerdnirvana.org/

A place filled with meaning, beauty, or significance can combine the worldly and ethereal, physical and spiritual, just as effectively as they are combined in a human being.  Places are not just things, objective.  They are entities, subjective, constantly evolving.  They are the geographic, natural, and cultural points that define our lives and our reality.  Places are second only to persons in importance, value, and significance.  Each place, like each person, is a unique creation of the One who made us all. Each place, like each person, has a character and a charisma all its own.  Just like people, who are born, live, and die, places come into being, exist for a miraculous period of moments or millennia, and pass into eternity. 

This is a great irony.  The delicacy and fragility of a place, its temporal and temporary nature, may be exactly the qualities that infuse it with the essence of the infinite and enable us to see its timeless beauty.  Quite often, it is only when we recognize that something may not always exist that we realize its true value.

Even places that seem durable may vary from day to day.  My home on a sunny summer afternoon is not the same as my home during a snowstorm.  My church on Sunday morning, filling with singing, is not the same as my church on a weeknight late in the autumn darkness, silent as stone.

I want to see as many of the wonderful places of this Earth as I possibly can in one lifetime.  I want to see them in different seasons, in different lights.  I want to sense the auras and feel the breezes, smell the aromas - fresh or musty or perfumed.  Some, I want to revisit.  Some places I love so much that I want to experience them more than once. 

The places around me are the canvas on which God has painted his masterpiece… The sounds of the people around me are the voice of God, speaking in love.

This world is filled with all sorts of wonders, far and near.  We should be aware.  We should respond.  I respond by traveling, visiting, "being there," and remembering with wonder and thanksgiving.  When possible I share my experiences with others who love life and places and being.  

My advice to you is this.  First, notice and appreciate the people around you, the people you love.  Next, take notice of the world you live in.  Appreciate the places where you find yourself - creation all around you, natural or man-made, old or new, beautiful or homely, durable or transitory.  Then, while keeping a firm hold on the places that are your very own, go forth and visit the wider world.  Seek out new people and places to know, because people and places alike are unique, fragile, wonderful gifts from God.  When you return to the place that is your own, you will be richer for having known more of the glory of the world. 

These places in which we live are a result of the joint effort of human beings and divine inspiration.  Our friends and forebearers have worked together in and with nature, operated in accordance with rules established by the Creator and under his watchful eye.  Together, these human and divine forces have created beautiful masterpieces of place intended to be known, appreciated, experienced, and loved.

Gryphem