Here is New York, Recognizing my Roots

Life leads us through many strange and wonderful twists and turns.  The seeds that germinates and grows into a sturdy tree may lie dormant for years before finding just the right circumstances to germinate and grow.  This is such a story.

Unabashedly, I am a New Yorker.  I may have lived in many places, London (both of them!), Paris, the English Moors, Nairobi, Mexico and the hills of Western Massachusetts to name some of the many, but my roots and the roots of my ancestors, well two generations anyway, are pure New York. When we moved to Boston, my mother believed that she was living in exile and held that belief until she settled in the mountains of central Mexico many decades later.

A few months ago my sister and I were going through some of our parents’ things that had been stored at her house when I found a slim volume that I had thought about frequently over the years, Here Is New York written by E. B. White.  You may know him from Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little or the (original) New Yorker. 

I’m not sure when my mother gave me this book, but I remember the reverence with which she presented it to me and our reading it together over the years.  And I’m not sure how it came to be in her possession.  Perhaps I asked her to take care of it while I traveled.

Here is New York is a love letter to the city of New York as it was in 1949 when I was but three years old.  It is embarrassingly out of date and at the same time essentially true.  Each time I have lived in New York I experienced the same sense of belonging to something unique, something ever-so-slightly wild but at the same time, home.

But the real reason that Here is New York has been important is that it was in this book that I found my first reference to what White calls “the 18 inches that surrounds each person”.  No matter how closely people may be packed together White observes that each one has their unique personal space that defines them.

Now, here’s the thing, it turns out that this information forms a major piece of the foundation of my teaching and therapeutic work.  Yes, we each have our personal space; some people might call it our aura, my teacher Thorn Coyle, calls it our circumference.  I use the term ‘edge’ or ‘outer edge’, a tribute to the Permaculture principle that the most growth happens along the edge. 

This space, and its edge, defines how we present ourselves in the world.  Throughout our lives, with more or less mindfulness, we hone the skill to work with the qualities within this space and most especially with its edges, the place where we actually meet each other.

It is ironic how our paths unfolds. This branch I trace back through teachings, esoteric and mundane to the wisdom of a simple yet profound New York observation of my youth.