On Belonging and Localness

An exploration of Charles Foster's "Being a Beast" through Deerfield Hills and my hometown

June 12, 2019

I sit by the river in downtown Flushing watching it flow swiftly by. I’ve spent so much time by the slow moving creek in Deerfield Hills that I nearly forgot the look and sound of a quick, full bodied river. The sun is warm, though there’s a chilly breeze in the air. Birds swoop to the river’s waves, tap them, and return to the trees.

It’s been pleasant these last few hours to sit and journal in a new, quiet place. I can’t help but hope I get the Library Assistant temp job if only to explore more places like this. These peaceful solo ventures mean so much more these days when my writing builds up before me. I could not have enough hours in a day to keep a record of my thoughts and dreams.

But I can live, wholly present, and write in the moment, hoping to not get too caught up in backlogging. I long to record ventures in nature and the new thoughts that arise from them. I want to connect to others’ ideas and process them by living it out. Ah, there I go sounding like Emerson and the need to live the ideas, to experience them, and actively read and live. 

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Charles Foster writes about two points of interest to me in Being a Beast: belonging and localness. In one chapter, as he explores the lives of badgers, he pretends to be one for a few weeks. While he explores the land at ground level, he compares the stark difference in the way badgers experience the world with their senses versus humans. A beautiful intertwining begins as he looks back through time at the history of the land and animals, including people, who have made it their home over the last millennia.

He defines localness for a badger as a “knowledge of the exact relationship of the individual badger’s body in both space and time to the wood.” I feel I’ve yet to truly process this. On the one hand, being aware of your body in space requires attention to all your senses. In relation to time in the wood, it takes another level of awareness. 

As a human, I think I’m overthinking the latter. To me, time is read as Time, all of it. Perhaps Foster only means days and seasons and hours. But he frequently refers to the ancestral lands of the badgers and their deep connection in time and body to a location.

Sometimes when I am out in nature, I get the very real awareness that I am here but for a moment. That humans as a whole have been here for the blink of an eye. You can feel the ancient roots of the animals to the place, roots most of us will never know ourselves.