A Sense of Place

New York is extraordinary in the spring. Today, I spent much of the day outside. I exercised along the Hudson from 7-8. I spent 9 until noon at the Bleecker St. playground, digging in the sandbox and scampering around the jungle gyms, surrounded by happy children and their bleary-eyed folks. This evening, James and I sat on our stoop with his trains and said hello to every dog and owner who walked by, under the shade of blossoming pear trees that are slowly dropping their blooms.

There was so much peace in this day for me, that it managed to obscure the other New York--the one that is everything today was not--the New York that is crowded, loud, cranky, troubled, expensive, work-a-holic, status-and-fashion-obsessed, transient, and also (although I wouldn't say this necessarily follows from transient, it seems to connect), selfish.

My love-hate with this place continues.

I read this New York Magazine article recently about young people who have recently arrived in New York. The article cited a recent survey which revealed that half of the people under 35 in this country want to live in New York. I find that a troubling thing. In fact, there's something in that number that connects to my struggle to feel at home here.

So many people my age are coming here, that we're chasing away all hopes of a home here to be found. And by "home," I mean that mystical, mythical sense of belonging to a place. Home as the place that is older, wiser, than the individual--home as a teacher of values. A home that is connected to geography, land, and history.

Maybe I've just got a ridiculously romanticized view of "home." Even back in the 19th century, Whitman describes New York as a home in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry that has no stable referents apart from the East River and the sky. But even then, in the midst of Whitman's vision of this city's crazy and overwhelming much-ness, he felt like things fit--like God was plainly visible in the chaos.

After 8 years, I can't (yet?) see Whitman's New York in my New York. Perhaps it's my very feeling of disconnect from the natural world here that ultimately leaves me shiftless and disoriented. Where Whitman connected to the rhythms of the water, the ebb-tide, the birds, the wind, and through them to the rhythms of the peoples' movement and the heaving and sighing and shuffling of the city, seeing it all as a wonderful whole, I find myself thinking too often that this city and its inhabitants (many as young and rootless as I) does not hold together--that things here are falling--or will fall--apart.

Many days here, I think that this space, this place, is not a home. But today... today, in this sun-dappled, radiant, floral playground of humanity, it was.