when you belong nowhere, you choose somewhere to call home

cities have spirits

view from the Zion shuttle bus

In Las Vegas rush hour starts at 3pm, our uber driver tells us. It’s swing shift, when night workers drift like pollen across a sleepless city from late afternoon to dawn. Across the way the lights are like spinning globes growing and dwindling, giving the road an ethereal, almost wet, gloss. We drive past Chinatown with its 24 hour cold noodle spots, briny and sour-sweet, past the lonely neon signs of a fast casual chain where a commuter stops, starved for evening, past the red canyons bursting with surprising green.

Cities have spirits, this much is true. Something as mundane as traffic can signal a deep core of how a city or place functions, its nerve endings. It’s similar to when someone’s small, insignificant behavior informs you an outsized amount about them. Small behaviors are intimate in that way. A momentary pang of something lovely, something like recognition.

I learned early that there are places that can hold you. Places that can’t. Places that alter your energetic center, places that feed you with purpose and oceanic love, and others that leave you empty, insincere, indulgent. Much of it is structural and somewhat obvious. Can I bump into my friends often through sheer proximity? Is the environment suitable for my preferred hobbies? What, physically, does this place reward? Then the questions bend spiritual. Do I like the average sum of conversations I’m having? Does my ambition get culled or fed here? Can I close the gap between my internal world and my external expression? Does this place provide the vocabulary with which I can describe my dreams? And when I describe my dreams, what are the reactions?

I’m laying in the small patch of grass by the Zion natural history museum while writing this. The exhibits inside display the restoration of native plants, stones, and animals. Some names I recognize: the cottonwood plant, peregrine falcon, clay, malachite, limonite, star flowered Solomon Plume, the mariposa and currants and mesquite and bulrush, wild grape. At harvest season, the local township make a sweet candy from all the wild cane that grows. The effort is to keep these traditions, species, expressions of humanity alive within generations that pass through a place, and let them take ancient practices and restore them, and shape them into new conduits for meaning.

The places we go influence the parts of ourselves we discover, retain, and nurture. At the same time, you can keep past selves close to your heart even in the absence of their origin. If you’re reading this, it’s highly likely you’re non-native to the city you live in. Perhaps you’re non-native, like me, to anywhere in particular. Instead, you are an amalgamation of worlds you carry within, that run like a feverish pulse through you. You’re reasonably disciplined and passionate; reasonably faithful and patient. You’re asking yourself where to be as a stand-in question for bigger questions. Namely, what version of yourself do you want to materialize? What is the right way one should live?

When you belong nowhere, many places can be home-shaped, or you can feel like a wanderer for longer than is comfortable: listless and drifting. Yet belonging nowhere means you get to choose your loyalties and your beliefs. You choose the stake to bear, the price you’ll pay. These decisions end up being consequential. To make them is to sharpen and ossify the wavering lines of fate and direction.

Here you are. Take this strange place and listen to its cacophony of sounds. Be attentive to its spirit. Initially, you find it dissonant, indecipherable. Then, you become accustomed to it. One day, you discover that you miss it terribly when you’re gone. After all this time, you still have it in you to be enchanted. This is a version of love I know well.

The tension is discerning in what ways places allow novel traits of yours to emerge; at the same time, enlarging your heart in the parts that feel essential, honest, and true. In that sense, it’s not so much simulating the perfect conditions to lay down the sticks and set up a life, but to seek a kinship between place and spirit: a resting ground that allows you to keep becoming.