ecoduction
What I wrote in my Place Corps application still stands true when exploring my relationship to place: I’m much more aware of / focused on cultivating my Place with a capital P rather than my place in terms of geography, region, or location. Place with a capital P locates my being in multidimensional-intersectional-psychospiritual realms… in other words, Place with a capital P might ask:
Where am I in the evolution of my life?
Where is my soul in relation to my heart or body or mind?
Am I here, in the present, or am I dreaming in future or past tenses?
What is my Place in the work I do—in the movements, communities, and organizations I’m a part of?
Why am I here on Earth?
What is my Place is the messy-evolving-glorious catastrophe/re-birth of our species on this planet?
Though Place with a capital P involves the geographic notions of place, I see physical locality as just one component that joins with other factors to reveal where and what my Place may be.
What I beginning to realize in this exploration is that my Place and my understandings of Place are inextricably tied to the place I’ve lived for the past four years. New York City is a place where everything and nothing is possible all at once… it’s a metropolis of contradictions and infinities and alternate realities… a place where all sorts of Places manifested for me at once.
New York City is also a place where, at times, I felt both extraordinarily at home and hopelessly home-less. I don’t mean this in the sense that I didn’t have a place to sleep, but rather in the sense that there were long periods in which I questioned my belonging to any community or neighborhood. I oscillated between these extremes—one day feeling like New York City is the only place I could ever live, the next day feeling like I was an extreme stranger to the life I was living. These contradictions and ambiguities have shaped how I understand ‘place’ as a word, idea, and feature of life.
———
All of these thoughts are really just a preface to a truth of my life that I haven’t fully wanted to embrace for many years: New York City is a core Place in my life, in my family’s life, and in my lineage. New York City greeted all of my ancestors when coming to this land, New York City birthed my grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles and both of my parents, New York City educated me, and New York City housed me and cared for me for, what feels like, the most conscious and impactful period of my life so far.
So, for the sake of this project, New York City is the place and Place that I will be exploring, not just to uncover the stories held within but to attempt to make sense of my messy and beautiful connection to this energy-sucking-ancestral-concrete-magic wonderland.
What brought me to New York City really lies in that which brought my ancestors to newly colonized Lenape land about 200 years ago. Fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, many of my them arrived via boat in search of liberation, belonging, and home. Their stories—although largely unknown to me—live in each step I’ve taken on New York City streets, particularly on the sidewalks of Alphabet City and central Brooklyn where I lived myself, just blocks away from the once-homes of my grandparents and their grandparents. They all brought me to that place, and they also infused in me a diasporic Jewish-New Yorker way of life that feels inextricably linked to my bloodstream.
Though my home base was in the suburbs of Maplewood, New Jersey, my childhood was braided through New York City streets. When asked where I was from as a kid, I remember choosing to say “the New York City area” instead of New Jersey. NJ Transit could bring you to Penn Station in 35 minutes, I didn't feel any deep sense of cultural belonging to New Jersey, and The New York times referenced Maplewood as if “Brooklyn were a suburb.” So it counted, right?
Beyond my suburban and ancestral connections, higher education brought me to New York City. In pursuit of knowledge, I left the suburbs and moved into a tiny dorm room on the southeast corner of Washington Square Park where I could hear the saxophonist play on Sunday mornings. My freshman year of school coincided with the 2016 presidential election campaign season, I loved my classes, and I had a great fake ID. Life was vibrant and I felt like I was at the heart of the world.
As I moved through my semesters of school, I began to recognize a timer within me—a timer that ticked for a few months before loudly erupting and forcing me to leave the city in search of bird songs, quiet mornings, and densely wooded areas. This timer was rhythmic, to the point that all four of my years in the city were speckled with Earthly escapes into whatever semi-wild area I could find.
Though I disliked the idea of needing to routinely escape in order to be balanced and happy, it felt justified. As a Type 7, E-N-T-J, and highly motivated being, New York City fed me in (almost) all of the ways I was seeking to be fed. To be in a city with a pace of life that mirrors the speed of new ideas emerging in my mind! To be in a city with millions of new people I could smile at every day! To be in a city with gatherings, celebrations, festivals, dinner parties, and dances to attend every week! I felt like I met my match.
The part of me that comes alive in the city is a part of me that I’ve fallen deeply in love with—the part of me that believes in my capacity to co-create impactful change, the part of me that can connect with myriad beautiful people in just a few hours, the part of me that sit on a delayed subway and make peace with it all… There’s magic in the chaos and speed and convergence of New York City life, and I love being part of that magic.
Yet, that magic rests on systems of pain, injustice, destruction, extraction, displacement, violence, and many, many more hyper-manifestations of the problems of this world. And that magic, although addicting, felt grossly incongruent with the lifestyles of reciprocity, regeneration, Earthly connection, communal power, and self-care I was striving to co-create.
So, I left.
Do I think about moving back? Yes, often.
Will I? I don't know.
My Place in New York City is ever-evolving, unfinished, and maybe about to enter a new chapter.