Step 2
ASKING and LISTENING

"Where Joseph and the Nez Perce band were attacked at dawn one year after Custer died, I meant to stand apart from my own life and listen. I meant to stand apart from my century, if I could. The people who raised me would recede, and I would stand apprentice to the place itself. If wisdom could be portable from history, I might read it there in some configuration of the ground. . .I had taken the exploratory vow: I will not eat until I learn from this place."

Kim Stafford

You might try Kim Stafford's vow: make a promise to yourself that you will not eat until you learn something from your place. Apprentice yourself to your place. Try to learn from it. Visit your place, and take careful notes, looking for things that you want to know more about. If it is impossible for you to visit your place, try these exercises by using your memory.

There are a few simple ways that you can listen for what a place has to teach: 

• you can find out something about its history, 
• you can learn more about the natural or the built environment that exists there, 
• and you can gather insights, either by interviews or by readings, from other people who have something to say about it. 

Before you are done, you might do all of these things.

But first, go to your place and listen as carefully as you can for what secrets it might be holding, for what it might teach you directly.

Writing Assignment:

First, Listen

Gather information for all five of your senses. What do you hear? What can you feel with your skin? Are there any tastes associated with the place? What do you smell? What do you see? Be specific: your writing is more vivid if you see a "grand fir, about forty feet high" than if you see simply a "tree."

Consider taking field guides along to identify trees, plants and birds you may not know.

Second, Ask Questions

Make a list of questions that you might be able to answer by visiting a library or interviewing someone. Here are the sort of questions you may attempt to answer. These are suggestions. If other questions, more closely related to your interests, occur to you, try writing preliminary answers to them.

How old are the trees that are there? How did they get planted? Are there any non-native tree growing there? Who might have planted them? Is the vegetation different than it would have been fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago?

Are there other lives that were connected with your place, that you wonder about? Try to imagine who was here, and what being here felt like for them. If there are buildings, where did the material to build them come from? Who built the buildings, and why? Who else has used the site, and what did it mean to them?

What is happening to the site today? Is it changing? In what ways? Is this good or bad?

Write down three or four questions that you don't know the answers to, but that you might be able to answer by interviewing others or visiting a library. Try to ask questions about nature, about history, and about the way other people have related to the place.

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