On Being a Water Soul

South Mill Pond at low tide

In my current writing project, a collection of non-fiction essays, I’m exploring the connection between landscapes and the people who move through them.  How do places define us?  This is a theme I’ve worked with in my fiction, looking at the isolation of an island community and the sorts of choices islanders must make as a result of living off shore.  In a conversation with my colleagues on the faculty at Southern NH University recently, I learned to think of people as ocean souls, or mountain souls, or desert souls.  Apparently research has been done on the landscapes where people feel most at home.  It’s not the same for all of us.  I suppose this is obvious, but it made me think again about our relationship to landscape.  Do we become habituated to the desert or mountains, and so feel more at home in them, or is the preference in born?  I suspect it goes deeper than simply what’s familiar to us.  I did not spend time in the mountains until I was in my early twenties, but I felt immediately as if I had found a place where I belonged.  I love the vast space and beauty of the desert, though it’s a place I want to visit, rather somewhere I see myself staying.  I don’t think I could ever live far from the ocean, on the other hand.

My home is on a tidal pond, and from my kitchen window I can watch the water rise and fall with the changing of the tides.  At low tide, the pond becomes a huge mud flat.  A friend who visited from Kansas said if she lived in my house, she would sit at the window and watch the water all day.  I laughed.  Most of the time, I barely give the tides a second thought.  Yet I recognize that the view of water, and its changing rhythms throughout the day, remind me to slow down, to stop and look again.  The pond beyond my windows speaks of stillness and quiet, something that changes but is unchanging.  I’m a lucky person to be living with this view, but more importantly, I just may be a slower and more thoughtful person because of it.  I wouldn’t want to choose between mountains and ocean – I love them both – but in the end, I am fundamentally a water soul.