“[L]ove of place is not like other loves, of people or animals, artifacts, activities, causes. A loved being or thing or idea is held by us, held in our arms, in our imagination; our love casts a glow around it. But a loved place holds us, even if it exists only in memory; it causes everything within it, including ourselves, to glow. A loved place is not encompassed by our love; we are encompassed, loved, breathed into life, by it. There is little recognition or articulation of this kind of relation between self and world in modern Western thought – little attention to categories that express the way the world makes room for us as opposed to the way we act on it, impose ourselves upon it. But many of us feel this accommodation, sense that we are indeed received and feel a huge but nameless emotion in response.”
— Freya Mathews, Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture (SUNY Press, 2005)
