What causes you to say stop. This is it. This is the where I stay.
And then how do you tune your body to a new geography? What does it take for your body to know the rhythms of a place, for you to become of that place? How many seasons? 5 years? 7 years? A generation? Do you have to be born there, to spend your childhood there, to build rituals into the seasons? Or is it further back? Do you need ancestors to be of a place before it is really yours? How many generations? Several? Enough to weave your family stories and history into the place? Or is it further? Do you need to stay long enough that the sunlight or lack of sunlight darkens or lightens your skin? Or, like moth, your wings change to match the bark of the trees. Like a bird your bill is shaped just perfectly to fit the flowers that grow only here. Somewhere in the span of three and three thousand years you find that you can no longer separate the landscape from who you’ve become.
This is the first in a series of posts inspired by and in support of the NOWHERE project. Text by Amie Tulius. Photograph by Nathan Webster