Where Do You Live?

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Sunday, October 9, 2022

Where Do You Live?

Yesterday my wife and I took six person hours to trim the Viburnum hedges and Bottlebrush bushes, on ornamental Laurel Oak and a Croton hedge that surround and fill the lot on which we live here in the City of Ocoee, Orange County, State of Florida, Country of The United States, on the North American continent on the Planet Earth. As a satellite spinning around the globe would snap a picture of us out there working it would be a telling photo of how small and particular we are in the multiverse as we attend to what to us is such an important activity taking up a significant portion of our day.

The house in which we live was built in 1999. Before we moved in that year, who was here on this lot? Orange groves, a small air strip nearby? And before that? Upland Pine Forest, I would think. And what Indigenous Native American Tribe – Seminole? And before that? Timucua? And before that? And do not forget, as I am doing here even as I write it now, the other native species, flora and fauna, who have been here and are here as well today.

Barry Lopez in his essay “Location,” writes of “ground-truthing” that scientists will do to visit and catalog what is actually on a given site to add to data of that site’s satellite image. On another level, a level of recognizing the animal and plant and human history of a specific location, what is the “ground-truth” of a place? What is the ground-truth of our place? And, mind you, then, how could I possibly call it mine, something I own? Psalm 24 knows this, of course, and has spoken it forthrightly for centuries: the earth is the Lord’s. No matter what your belief system, the ground-truth of that is the same: wherever we are certainly does not belong to us as much as we belong to it.

Where do you live?