Year of Spiritual Thinking 4.1 (Month 4, Week 1)
Querencia
Querencia n. A metaphysical concept in the Spanish language. The term comes from the Spanish verb “querer,” which means “to desire” or “to love.” Querencia has also been defined as “homing instinct” and “favorite place.” Also, the place where people feel most secure, gain strength and feel at home. —an amalgam of definitions from Wikipedia, Larousse Gran Diccionario Español and other sources
I’m a quarter of the way into my Year of Spiritual Thinking project and I’m surprised by what is emerging. Recently, it's one particular word popping into my consciousness over and over: querencia.
I first learned the word querencia in the 1990s when Richard, Molly and I moved to Las Cruces, in the Chihuahuan Desert of Southern New Mexico, and I have associated it with the state ever since. It’s just a New Mexico kind of word.
Perhaps you remember it from Ernest Hemingway’s book on bullfighting and life, Death in the Afternoon. Hemingway uses querencia in what may be the classical Spanish meaning, the place in a bullring where the bull feels most strong and safe, where “he has his back against the wall and … is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.”
The meaning of querencia I learned and the way the word is most often used here is quite different, more like “heart’s home” or “place of belonging.”
Reading New Mexico writer Stephen Bodio’s memoir, titled simply Querencia, when we lived in Las Cruces helped me understand my contradictory emotions about the harsh and huge Chihuahuan Desert. I had been trying to make the place my querencia by approaching the desert as a scientist. Bodio’s writing made me realize I needed to do more: I had to let the desert and the wild and human communities into my heart.
As I wrote in the last chapter of Barren, Wild and Worthless, my memoir-ish book of personal essays about that often-misunderstood landscape,
To me, the desert is not just a fascinating landscape to study; it is a community to which I want to belong. … To really know the desert, I must suspend my distance and dare to enter into a personal relationship with this landscape. I must risk my love.
I did come to love the Chihuahuan Desert. But paradoxically, opening my heart to the desert helped me understand that while I might provisionally belong, it would never be my querencia, my heart’s home.
I am always and forever bound to the great sea of big sagebrush, an aromatic shrub with three-tipped silver-green leaves, which defines a huge swath the inland West, from northern New Mexico, where I now live, far north into of Canada, and from the west slope of the Rocky Mountains to the east slope of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges.
If the air smells like big sagebrush’s peculiar fragrance of camphor and citrus blossoms, I’m in the region of my querencia, the landscape where I truly feel I belong.
Querencia and Spirituality
Why does querencia come to mind as I am pondering spirituality?
Querencia explains what I’ve learned in the first three months of my year of exploring what spirituality means to me, and what practices support and deepen my spiritual life. I can enjoy reading theology, philosophy, history and myth, and I come away better informed. But still longing for a transcendent connection with the sacredness in the universe.
That comes from being outside, absorbed in the landscapes I love, in community with all of the lives who weave this inland sea of prairie and scrubby woodland. When I am immersed in nature, especially in this place that is my querencia, I feel part of the oneness of the universe, in awe of the majesty and terrible beauty that is life on this earth.
In other words, my “church” is nature. Specifically, nature here at the edge of the West’s sagebrush sea. This place where I am at home is also where I am most deeply connected to community and spirit.
My spirituality is an expression of my terraphilia, my innate affiliation for Earth and the whole panoply of diverse lives with whom we share this numinous planet. So where and when I am most aware of my terraphilia, I am also most connected to my spirituality.
Which shouldn’t be surprising for a human. Earth, the only home our species has ever known, is the cradle that rocked us into being as loving and thinking and creative and spiritual creatures. Earth is the motherlode of our terraphilia. You could argue that the whole planet is our species’ querencia.
For me, spirituality is place- and nature-based. It is experiential, not theoretical. I have to be outside in the community of the land to most deeply hear and feel the sacred. It flows out of my heart’s home, the place where I am most intimately connected to the planet.
Querencia and terraphilia and spirituality are all connected, all part of the same deeply human impulse to be part of the sacred, the mystery that impels life on this planet. Perhaps that idea is no surprise to you, but to me, it’s revelatory. It helps me understand the powerful and wordless urge that propels me, grumbling, out the door every day, no matter the weather or my mood, for my dawn walking meditation.
Because outside is where the living world wraps me in love and tenderness, heightens my concentration and awareness, soothes my fears and anxieties, and fills me with wonder and awe. Because outside is where the magic of life inspires me.
Where is your querencia? How does your heart’s home relate to your terraphilia and your spirituality? Hit the comment below and share if you wish.
What I’m Reading
Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday, Gunilla Norris: Brief but profound meditations on the sacred in the ordinary, as simple as walking across a wood floor. Good for inspiring a daily practice of mindfulness and awareness of the wonder in our daily lives.
In Praise of Listening, Christian McEwen: Short chapters explore the many forms of listening—listening to our inner voices, listening to the landscape, listening to our bodies, listening to our art—with abundant examples and anecdotes.
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel C. Dennett: A philosopher looks at how religion evolved and how it impacts us. Fascinating and thought-provoking.
So Quietly the Earth, David Lee: Not quiet at all, these poems sing, shout, thunder and throb with the spirit of the desert Southwest. Read them at your peril, for they will break your heart open (and make you laugh, too).
Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize
Substacker, writer and writing teacher
recently announced the Wild Muse Nature Writing prize,An invitation to write ourselves back into nature, back into our nature, by calling for pieces that reflect nature’s wisdom and healing.
The prize invites submissions of personal stories, articles, anecdotes and essays of up to 2,000 words for the contest, which will be judged by Blandy and literary agent Sarah Williams. Details here.
I couldn’t agree with or relate more to your heart felt words about Nature’s Sanctuary. The marvel of how everything is in balance, works together for survival, & the amazing beauty of it all astounds me! My home in the Sierra foothills of 50 years has been a gift that keeps giving even through the extreme droughts in the past & the changes on the land. Nature teaches us so much if we only listen & tend to it.
I didn't know there was such a word. And my answer to your question is the subject of my piece I published this morning. I belong to the land where my mother grew up and where I spent many childhood summer vacations. Fierce attachment and spiritual connections to land is something we share. These two pieces almost seem in conversation with one another. Thanks for the WORD.