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.
Carroll, I am so glad that you have that home in the Sierra Foothills to serve as your heart's home even through the changes of the decades. May it always nourish, inspire and hold you!
Recognizing the sacred in the ordinary- yes! My querencia is changing, due to both the limits of this illness and the secularization of modern society. I live both on tiptoe and in fog now….i wonder what my deeper, more enduring querencia is….
"I live both on tiptoe and in fog now...." Such a poignant and evocative description, Kathryn! I wonder how much your health is a reflection of the painful changes in the world today. It seems to me that some of us are more sensitive to the hurting in the world; perhaps our bodies are simply overwhelmed by the negative energy (for lack of a better term) and that makes us like the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, our health reflecting the ills of the world. As for your querencia, I suspect it is written on your heart, which isn't always an easy thing to read.
Yes, I think some of us do reflect and carry the anxiety of the world more keenly. I’ve been thinking more about this since I commented a little bit ago. Where I am most comfortable, where I am almost at home…I’ve lived in 16 houses in seven different states. In each of those places, I have found something of home, and it almost always has to do with being surrounded by nature, nurtured by books, and encouraged to share my gifts in a spiritual community. I just got up from a nap and realized that in here our smaller house the things I have hung on the walls are the pictures of my grandparents’s farm houses and our family’s cabin in the woods. The earliest places I felt at home. Being at home means I have quiet and space and time to myself. I’m going to keep thinking about all this… Thank you!
I love the idea of Querencia. It would be in nature for me, on my many walks and trails. I always wish I lived there and could just step out the door and be there! I make do with my gardens of flowers, so alive this Spring. I would so hate living in a high-rise. I need to find a way to grow veggies that the animals about can't get to. I don't mind sharing, but decimating is no way to get along, I tell them--deer and bunnies and squirrels!
Gardens are a wonderful way to bring nature into your daily life, and I am glad you have your flowers to bring you joy and nurture your spirit. As for growing veggies despite your voracious wild neighbors, can you fence a plot for your edibles? When I lived with elk wandering through the yard, I had an 8X10 foot plot fenced to eight feet to keep them from munching my edibles to the ground. (They ate the flowers outside the fence though!)
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.
What wonderful synchronicity between your piece and mine! I saw your Fierce Attachment piece and said, "I need to read that later." So I'll go do it now. And you are welcome--may querencia be a word that opens new understanding of your attachment and connections to the land of your mother's growing up. (BTW, querencia is pronounced CARE-en-see-uh.)
Thanks for the phonetic pronunciation as I am unfamiliar with the Spanish language. I'm also looking for a word that describes the feeling of belonging to a place you don't own but owns you even though it is not your home and there is a sense of longing to return there. I think many of us who grew up in the Midwest and spent time at the lake or camping or at a cabin know this longing to return to a place they have visited that beckons them back again and again. I love the gift of this word you've given me. Thank you!
My ten acre home in the wild Sonoran grasslands is named Querencia Hill. Querencia is that safe place where we can be our authentic self. For me, it is inextricably tied to wild, dark, silent places and the natural cycles. I have nurtured this place for several years. I am selling and moving on to my next Querencia. Where is that? I don't know. Life has shown me that spirit puts me where I need to be. Our querencias definitely change with age.
I like your way of putting it, Christina, "that safe place where we can be our authentic self." That captures how querencia feels to me at this point in my life. I hope you find a great person to steward your Querencia Hill and that spirit shows you the new place to be you in time. Many blessings and a warm hug, fellow traveler!
Oh Susan. Thank you! Can you hear raucous joy emanating from my heart like a flock of wildly excited birds? Such a beautiful piece. I love the numinous idea of Querencia. I speak Spanish and have not caught onto this until your piece. I’ll going be marinating in it for a good long while. So thrilled I get to carry this idea with me as my husband and I go to Santa Fe (from BV) for a couple days. The “sage sea” is my true heart’s home. I always explain this landscape, this palette of silver sage and golden grasses (so stunningly captured in the photo) with mountains rising around me as the landscape of my heart, and the red desert of Canyonlands and Utah as the landscape of my soul. Thank you for sharing this powerful journey you are on. I’m enjoying every nourishing morsel. Hugs to you, kindred heart.
I appreciate your labeling landscapes of heart and soul. That distinction was so helpful to me in better understanding how the ocean (heart) and desert (soul) pull at and embrace me. Thank you.
Jody, Do you remember that raft trip we took together on the Arkansas River? I can see in how you responded to the water and the land on that trip your explanation ocean as your heart-place and desert as your soul-place. Not that the Arkansas is like the ocean, mind you, but I remember being struck then by how your body was so pulled between both worlds. Which makes sense given what you wrote here.
Thanks for sharing you astute awareness and insight. It is often a significant gift for me to see through the eyes of someone i admire, trust, and respect.
"Raucous joy emanating from my heart like a flock of wildly excited birds"--I can hear it, and it's so you! I think of querencia as a very New Mexico word, not so much used--at least in this way--in other parts of the Spanish-speaking world. Or perhaps not used so publicly. In some ways querencia is a private sort of word, I suppose. I am glad that speaking of it here is bringing you joy and inspiration for your own sweet and generously loving life. Enjoy your escape in Santa Fe!
Susan, your journey is so moving to me. It's one I have been traveling for a number of years, though maybe not as thought-fully.
My first experience of my hearts home was moving to our farmhouse in rural Arkansas 35 years ago. In the decade we were there, I learned more about place, nature, sky, spirit, self. A path was laid and I have followed its route until reaching my trues hearts home in western North Carolina three and a half years ago. Here I've found a life I never dreamed possible. One of peace and comfort, community and love. I still wander my path but in my own garden. A place I firmly believe was given to me from my deepest need.
Kathleen! How lovely to hear your voice here on Substack! One of the few things I miss about not being on X (formerly Twitter) anymore are your morning greetings there. I am so glad that you found your querencia there in western North Carolina! May the ridges and valleys hold you their misty embrace for the rest of your days--and may you be richly rewarded for the love you give this world. Blessings, Susan
I need to do a deeper dive into this question. I grew up in the mountains and valleys in NE PA. I've lived most of my adult life in the prairie land of Ohio. My heart swells when I step onto the quartz beach in Siesta Key, Florida. Lots to ponder and appreciate. On my first visit to Sante Fe (My first visit to New Mexico) it was the smell that captivated me. That and the gorgeous contrast of red and silvery green there. Thanks Susan, for this thought provoking piece.
I'll be interested to hear what you learn as you think about querencia. One facet of the idea of a place that is our heart's home is that it's also where we feel safest to be our true selves, not just the selves we don for public interaction. I think in general our culture is too focused on achievements and possessions to teach us to listen to the subtle cues of attachment to land and place, and honestly, our planet is suffering for that lack of attachment. And we are too, missing out on the contentment and richness of belonging. xo to you!
Susan, thank you for introducing me to this wonderful word! I have spent my life looking for my "querencia." Its meaning, or something like it, has driven my life. I moved a lot as a child, living in different regions of the country. Then I continued to move as an adult, always looking for home. When people ask me where I'm from, I say, "nowhere." Sometimes I say, "everywhere." The landscapes of the west speaks to my internal geography. NYC speaks to my mind. I want to find the physical place that I don't want to leave, my querencia. I don't know if I will. In some ways, I've stopped looking. I have found my home in certain people, in relationships, and in myself. I carry my belonging with me. And now I have another word, another nuance with which to look at this life defining topic.
Emily, I think the interesting thing about querencia is that it's not necessarily a place where you live, but a place or places you feel most at home. For some of us, that's one specific place. For others, it's more nuanced. For me, my querencia will always be the sagebrush country of northwest Wyoming that has been home all my life. But because the human culture there and my life-circumstances have both changed (I'm a widow in my late sixties, living alone), it's not the hearts-home where I can live now. Northern New Mexico is where I feel most free to be myself now. So I guess I'm saying, querencia can indeed be complicated! And as you say, you carry your belonging with you, a lovely phrase and acknowledgement of the nuances with the idea. Blessings to you!
I love the idea of a place "I feel most free to be myself." I think I latched on to the idea of geography because finding a home where the physical geography "fit" me, and then getting to stay there, has driven a lot of my life. That drive or longing has gotten more nuanced (as you say) over time. But I do feel grief around my sense of physical placelessness. I'm going to ponder the places where I feel free to be myself both physical and otherwise.
Truly lovely, and although I may have been honestly a little too 'right brained' for science, I managed to make a good thing of it, and in my fifties learned to fully embrace my scientist's heart as well as my lover's heart with the world around me. My own deserts are the Namib, Kalahari and Karoo, the lands I adopted as a young woman, and now that my daughter is moving to Arizona to finish her studies, I may have a chance to get to know the Southwestern USA deserts too. Your wonderful piece calls me to do so - thank you Susan!
Phoebe, I believe that the right-brainedness that we bring to science may be our most valuable contribution. Have you ever read the book, The Feminine Face of Science? If not, it's worth looking for. As for reconciling the scientist's heart and the lover's heart, I'm with you there! That's been my life-long practice, and is a major thread in one of my memoirs (Walking Nature Home, A Life's Journey). I would love to see your deserts there in Southern Africa someday, in part because they were the last deserts my botanist great-granddad, William A Cannon, studied in his long career working as a research scientist for the Carnegie Institute in the early 1900s. How exciting that your daughter is moving to Arizona to finish her studies! You'll have a whole new set of deserts to explore when you visit her. Many blessings to you both!
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.
Carroll, I am so glad that you have that home in the Sierra Foothills to serve as your heart's home even through the changes of the decades. May it always nourish, inspire and hold you!
Recognizing the sacred in the ordinary- yes! My querencia is changing, due to both the limits of this illness and the secularization of modern society. I live both on tiptoe and in fog now….i wonder what my deeper, more enduring querencia is….
"I live both on tiptoe and in fog now...." Such a poignant and evocative description, Kathryn! I wonder how much your health is a reflection of the painful changes in the world today. It seems to me that some of us are more sensitive to the hurting in the world; perhaps our bodies are simply overwhelmed by the negative energy (for lack of a better term) and that makes us like the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, our health reflecting the ills of the world. As for your querencia, I suspect it is written on your heart, which isn't always an easy thing to read.
Yes, I think some of us do reflect and carry the anxiety of the world more keenly. I’ve been thinking more about this since I commented a little bit ago. Where I am most comfortable, where I am almost at home…I’ve lived in 16 houses in seven different states. In each of those places, I have found something of home, and it almost always has to do with being surrounded by nature, nurtured by books, and encouraged to share my gifts in a spiritual community. I just got up from a nap and realized that in here our smaller house the things I have hung on the walls are the pictures of my grandparents’s farm houses and our family’s cabin in the woods. The earliest places I felt at home. Being at home means I have quiet and space and time to myself. I’m going to keep thinking about all this… Thank you!
I love the idea of Querencia. It would be in nature for me, on my many walks and trails. I always wish I lived there and could just step out the door and be there! I make do with my gardens of flowers, so alive this Spring. I would so hate living in a high-rise. I need to find a way to grow veggies that the animals about can't get to. I don't mind sharing, but decimating is no way to get along, I tell them--deer and bunnies and squirrels!
Gardens are a wonderful way to bring nature into your daily life, and I am glad you have your flowers to bring you joy and nurture your spirit. As for growing veggies despite your voracious wild neighbors, can you fence a plot for your edibles? When I lived with elk wandering through the yard, I had an 8X10 foot plot fenced to eight feet to keep them from munching my edibles to the ground. (They ate the flowers outside the fence though!)
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.
What wonderful synchronicity between your piece and mine! I saw your Fierce Attachment piece and said, "I need to read that later." So I'll go do it now. And you are welcome--may querencia be a word that opens new understanding of your attachment and connections to the land of your mother's growing up. (BTW, querencia is pronounced CARE-en-see-uh.)
Thanks for the phonetic pronunciation as I am unfamiliar with the Spanish language. I'm also looking for a word that describes the feeling of belonging to a place you don't own but owns you even though it is not your home and there is a sense of longing to return there. I think many of us who grew up in the Midwest and spent time at the lake or camping or at a cabin know this longing to return to a place they have visited that beckons them back again and again. I love the gift of this word you've given me. Thank you!
My ten acre home in the wild Sonoran grasslands is named Querencia Hill. Querencia is that safe place where we can be our authentic self. For me, it is inextricably tied to wild, dark, silent places and the natural cycles. I have nurtured this place for several years. I am selling and moving on to my next Querencia. Where is that? I don't know. Life has shown me that spirit puts me where I need to be. Our querencias definitely change with age.
I like your way of putting it, Christina, "that safe place where we can be our authentic self." That captures how querencia feels to me at this point in my life. I hope you find a great person to steward your Querencia Hill and that spirit shows you the new place to be you in time. Many blessings and a warm hug, fellow traveler!
Oh Susan. Thank you! Can you hear raucous joy emanating from my heart like a flock of wildly excited birds? Such a beautiful piece. I love the numinous idea of Querencia. I speak Spanish and have not caught onto this until your piece. I’ll going be marinating in it for a good long while. So thrilled I get to carry this idea with me as my husband and I go to Santa Fe (from BV) for a couple days. The “sage sea” is my true heart’s home. I always explain this landscape, this palette of silver sage and golden grasses (so stunningly captured in the photo) with mountains rising around me as the landscape of my heart, and the red desert of Canyonlands and Utah as the landscape of my soul. Thank you for sharing this powerful journey you are on. I’m enjoying every nourishing morsel. Hugs to you, kindred heart.
I appreciate your labeling landscapes of heart and soul. That distinction was so helpful to me in better understanding how the ocean (heart) and desert (soul) pull at and embrace me. Thank you.
Jody, Do you remember that raft trip we took together on the Arkansas River? I can see in how you responded to the water and the land on that trip your explanation ocean as your heart-place and desert as your soul-place. Not that the Arkansas is like the ocean, mind you, but I remember being struck then by how your body was so pulled between both worlds. Which makes sense given what you wrote here.
Thanks for sharing you astute awareness and insight. It is often a significant gift for me to see through the eyes of someone i admire, trust, and respect.
"Raucous joy emanating from my heart like a flock of wildly excited birds"--I can hear it, and it's so you! I think of querencia as a very New Mexico word, not so much used--at least in this way--in other parts of the Spanish-speaking world. Or perhaps not used so publicly. In some ways querencia is a private sort of word, I suppose. I am glad that speaking of it here is bringing you joy and inspiration for your own sweet and generously loving life. Enjoy your escape in Santa Fe!
Susan, your journey is so moving to me. It's one I have been traveling for a number of years, though maybe not as thought-fully.
My first experience of my hearts home was moving to our farmhouse in rural Arkansas 35 years ago. In the decade we were there, I learned more about place, nature, sky, spirit, self. A path was laid and I have followed its route until reaching my trues hearts home in western North Carolina three and a half years ago. Here I've found a life I never dreamed possible. One of peace and comfort, community and love. I still wander my path but in my own garden. A place I firmly believe was given to me from my deepest need.
And I am grateful.
Kathleen
Kathleen! How lovely to hear your voice here on Substack! One of the few things I miss about not being on X (formerly Twitter) anymore are your morning greetings there. I am so glad that you found your querencia there in western North Carolina! May the ridges and valleys hold you their misty embrace for the rest of your days--and may you be richly rewarded for the love you give this world. Blessings, Susan
I need to do a deeper dive into this question. I grew up in the mountains and valleys in NE PA. I've lived most of my adult life in the prairie land of Ohio. My heart swells when I step onto the quartz beach in Siesta Key, Florida. Lots to ponder and appreciate. On my first visit to Sante Fe (My first visit to New Mexico) it was the smell that captivated me. That and the gorgeous contrast of red and silvery green there. Thanks Susan, for this thought provoking piece.
I'll be interested to hear what you learn as you think about querencia. One facet of the idea of a place that is our heart's home is that it's also where we feel safest to be our true selves, not just the selves we don for public interaction. I think in general our culture is too focused on achievements and possessions to teach us to listen to the subtle cues of attachment to land and place, and honestly, our planet is suffering for that lack of attachment. And we are too, missing out on the contentment and richness of belonging. xo to you!
Susan, thank you for introducing me to this wonderful word! I have spent my life looking for my "querencia." Its meaning, or something like it, has driven my life. I moved a lot as a child, living in different regions of the country. Then I continued to move as an adult, always looking for home. When people ask me where I'm from, I say, "nowhere." Sometimes I say, "everywhere." The landscapes of the west speaks to my internal geography. NYC speaks to my mind. I want to find the physical place that I don't want to leave, my querencia. I don't know if I will. In some ways, I've stopped looking. I have found my home in certain people, in relationships, and in myself. I carry my belonging with me. And now I have another word, another nuance with which to look at this life defining topic.
The list of books looks great!
Emily, I think the interesting thing about querencia is that it's not necessarily a place where you live, but a place or places you feel most at home. For some of us, that's one specific place. For others, it's more nuanced. For me, my querencia will always be the sagebrush country of northwest Wyoming that has been home all my life. But because the human culture there and my life-circumstances have both changed (I'm a widow in my late sixties, living alone), it's not the hearts-home where I can live now. Northern New Mexico is where I feel most free to be myself now. So I guess I'm saying, querencia can indeed be complicated! And as you say, you carry your belonging with you, a lovely phrase and acknowledgement of the nuances with the idea. Blessings to you!
I love the idea of a place "I feel most free to be myself." I think I latched on to the idea of geography because finding a home where the physical geography "fit" me, and then getting to stay there, has driven a lot of my life. That drive or longing has gotten more nuanced (as you say) over time. But I do feel grief around my sense of physical placelessness. I'm going to ponder the places where I feel free to be myself both physical and otherwise.
I'll be interested to know what you find in your pondering. Maybe you'll write about it?
Me too! And, yes, if I discover something illuminating, no doubt, I'll write about it:)
Truly lovely, and although I may have been honestly a little too 'right brained' for science, I managed to make a good thing of it, and in my fifties learned to fully embrace my scientist's heart as well as my lover's heart with the world around me. My own deserts are the Namib, Kalahari and Karoo, the lands I adopted as a young woman, and now that my daughter is moving to Arizona to finish her studies, I may have a chance to get to know the Southwestern USA deserts too. Your wonderful piece calls me to do so - thank you Susan!
Phoebe, I believe that the right-brainedness that we bring to science may be our most valuable contribution. Have you ever read the book, The Feminine Face of Science? If not, it's worth looking for. As for reconciling the scientist's heart and the lover's heart, I'm with you there! That's been my life-long practice, and is a major thread in one of my memoirs (Walking Nature Home, A Life's Journey). I would love to see your deserts there in Southern Africa someday, in part because they were the last deserts my botanist great-granddad, William A Cannon, studied in his long career working as a research scientist for the Carnegie Institute in the early 1900s. How exciting that your daughter is moving to Arizona to finish her studies! You'll have a whole new set of deserts to explore when you visit her. Many blessings to you both!