On a road between forlorn brick industrial shops, beside an old railway track, under a new overpass and scattered about by the odd street tent, lies an otherwise ignored road. So ignored, in fact, that the last time it was paved it was done without thinking that the cobblestone underneath the new overlay wasn't worth seeing again.
And yet, the pavement upgrade has now worn away by the years of hard use and revealed the cobble shining clean and uncompromising beneath. The remaining makeover now simply imitates sand being washed helplessly over sea-side-sapphire, before being washed back into the greatness of time.

I'm reading a book from a guest lecturer I had last year in one of my classes. His book is called "the small heart of things" and in it he suggests that

Place has a profound bearing upon our lives, from the countries we are born into, or end up inhabiting, to the light, landscape, and weather peculiar to our home regions. Each has a say in shaping our cultures and our souls

He quotes from artist Alan Gussow:

The catalyst that converts any physical location-any environment if you will- into a place, is a process of experiencing deeply. A place is a piece of a whole environment that has been claimed by feelings. Viewed simply as a life support system, the earth viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places

The concept of self-determination as a value and thereby our pro-view to borders defining nationhoods, plays into our politically correct neurosis that some geography belongs to the ethnicity which has the longer or stronger claim to it. The very reality that the longer culture is attached to where they call home, has validity for the very fact that for them it likely feels more like home. But does it hold that someone else might approach that geography and find something of themselves in it from a different relationship?

Everyone wants to be an initiate. And home is an important idea.

But the pavement rubs away, and Identities shift like tectonic plates. Earthquakes come and remind us we are moments, lucky to witness a re-ordering. Nature, and humans, adapt. And something about that is strangely comforting. That this story goes on. And maybe we play a valuable part.