Stay in place. Be where you are. Never has place been more important. Where are your local resources? What is your local support system? What is your underground root system? Walk down your street, look out your window, tend to your garden. We have all contracted in, and yet somehow expanded, paying attention to what and who’s around us more than ever before. We can’t impatiently change the channel to another place to be. We must be here now.
The streets are quiet and people are walking and biking like never before. We can hear the birds sing! Neighbors, families, children and dogs I’ve never seen before now form a daily parade in the street in front of my house. Two-year old Cameron and his Mom make regular rounds up and down the block three or four times a day, stopping to wave and visit with my dog. I expect him now and feel we’ve developed a porch-to-sidewalk relationship that will last well beyond the lockdown.
People, many for the first time, are getting to know their towns and cities in detail on foot and bike, asking: Where can I walk? Where are the sidewalks? Which streets are nice to walk down? Where can I bike to today? Where CAN I be outside of my home? Suddenly, people have a heightened appreciation of their accessible parks and open spaces ( or the sad absence of them ). They serve as an essential pressure relief valve for all of us, particularly now.
Limiting choice can be eye-opening. You start noticing what’s around you, what’s here. In my search for food, I discovered “Jenn” of Chickadee Farms, who delivers meal-transforming fresh produce every Thursday at the neighborhood bar down the street. In my search for movement, my magical neighbor “Glenda” appeared, offering calming online yoga classes that keep me steady and sane. When it was time to plant my spring garden, “Sarah” of Field to Cottage Nursery porch-dropped native plants in my neighborhood, and I wait all week in anticipation of the fresh bread pickup from “Sam,” of Boulted Bread, who stone mills his own flour. Every week I discover a new branch in the underground root system of Raleigh. I know I am lucky, that it’s not like this for everyone, but it’s clear that going forward, we must ask ourselves how to intentionally nurture this kind of support system in every town and city, how to better cultivate our local gardens of small business, identity, and culture. We must strengthen the unique “here” of every place.
The virus has cast a bright light on the importance of people and place. It has been a reminder of the value of being supported by a larger local network, especially when we are feeling vulnerable, and this will not be the last time we will feel vulnerable. Places are built on small scale personal interactions and relationships. Like the underground mycelium celebrated in the fantastic new movie Fantastic Fungi, our strength is built incrementally from the bottom up, in expansive interconnected networks, where each of us blossoms and feeds the whole, energizing and supporting each other. It’s these personal connections to each other that make us strong, flexible and most importantly, resilient, now and in the future.
A few resources for building resilient local ecosystems of place: Slow Money, Incremental Development Alliance, Strong Towns.