Place is at once something intimately familiar and impossible to properly define.
It is the most universal of experiences and yet intensely personal. While it is arguably the first sense we all develop in common, the experience of it, our individual sense of it, is likewise often something we cannot satisfactorily explain, even to those closest to us.
It is just that enigmatic quality I think that has drawn me to it as an idea worth investigating, for as long as I can remember. It has been an integral part of all that I do, the way I approach life, where I’ve lived, what I have studied, with whom I have interacted, how I think – defining me if I have not been so successful at defining it. It has determined how I have earned a living for most of my life and ensured that my professional and personal lives were in many ways one in the same.
It has existed for me not so much a driving force as a leading force.
My need to explore and understand the meaning and potency of place drew me into creative expression even before it shaped the characteristics of my professional work. Two channels in particular, writing and photography, have served for me
as the best way to capture and convey my sense of place and in my estimation there are few greater joys than wandering through this world, familiar places or new, with camera in hand, taking it all in.
To convey that experience in writing is another thing altogether. I have had plenty of opportunity and even in the most structured of contexts associated with my job, that compelling mystery of place has seeped in, colouring my choice of words. Its prevalence, insistence really, led me in fact to blogging, as a format providing the opportunity for at least a modicum of the less formal prose I felt was required.
This however is my first attempt at a purely personal blog, one with no affiliation to a professional role. It’s daunting in the level of freedom it affords, but I’m prepared and comfortable to let it go where it will. As such I have no preconceived notions or prejudices about what it might contain, the style of writing, the use of imagery, the formats employed or the frequency of posts.
Nor do I have any expectations about readership. I am neither posting this exclusively for my own purposes nor publishing content expressly for an audience, but maybe instead blogging for something that represents a blend of the two.
That being said I do have ideas, plenty of them, for content. Using this as a vehicle for testing various elements of my creative writing, giving it a bit of the light of day for instance, is certainly within scope. As is posting my photography and exploring pairings with prose, as a wine well matched with a meal, on the menu of possibilities.
As I have almost always done thus far, I’ll let the unfailing draw of place set my path and my pace.
place 