“The unseen spirit of a place has its deep desire and if it’s the same as yours then your small desire goes down like an anchor into the depths.”~Elizabeth Goudge in The Scent of Water
In the tiny pantry at the top of the basement stairs, I hung the calendar of England my husband gave me for Christmas. Every thirty days revealed another bucolic scene when I flipped the page, and on the first day of each month, I stepped into the photograph as if I lived there. My inner self lived in the Cotswolds or London or Oxford under the grey skies of England, while my outer self continued to live in a brick colonial with a bad case of sparse azaleas in suburban Pennsylvania.
The calendar was my way of laying claim to a place I had yet to see, but a place I sensed held the power to change me. As a child, I dreamt of England’s emerald hills, its castles and church spires and hidden hamlets. I created memories of the imagination. I saw myself riding a red bus through narrow streets, sipping tea with a clotted cream-slathered scone, and walking to the slip-slap sound of my feet on cobblestone. I dreamt in Austen and Brontë and Dickens. It was as alive in me as if I had stepped through Monet’s painting of the Houses of Parliament and lived within the frame of it.
The year I turned twenty-five, my watercolor dreams became a reality. My husband accepted a job transfer and we moved to London with our toddler in tow. The dream was no longer a hazy vision of some wished for future. It was a painted brick, climbing ivy, and blue front door reality.
As we made a life for ourselves, I recognized that the deep desire of London’s spirit spoke the same language as my soul. And, just as Goudge describes so beautifully, my small desire sank into the depths of it. I cast my anchor into the dark churn of the River Thames where it buried itself in silt and rock, immovable. The river murmured “Home, Home, Home” every time I walked within view of it.
Four years later, our time in London came to an end. We moved back to the US for my husband’s new job and created a life for our family in New Jersey. Many years and a few more moves later, home is both here in New Jersey and across the ocean. Regardless of how much time passes, a part of my heart remains anchored and rooted in England.
The place became one with my person because we spoke the same language of desire. I can’t speak this language out loud, it is an inner knowing, an understanding, a private language between a place and a person. It is the language of belonging. It is peculiar and serendipitous and a little impossible to believe that a place might hold that kind of power over a human being, but I wonder if perhaps places shape us as much as we shape them. I have the shape of England imprinted like a love poem on my soul. It formed me. It wrote me into being.
Every summer brings with it the old longing for the place I feel most myself and most curiously aware that I belong. We returned last summer for a brief visit, and the cobbled streets whispered my name and London spoke to the desires of my soul, and I was struck again by the truth that England and I still speak the same ancient language.
Every summer, the rope to my anchor grows taut across the ocean. The Thames pulls and murmurs, and I feel myself called once again towards home.
Is there a place where you have sunk your anchor? A place where you are deeply moored? What effect does this place have on you?
