Chameleon
People
“It's
just a theory really, but I have always thought that your physical
surroundings can shape your voice and personality.”
K. D. Lang
It makes sense that our
physical being would be influenced by our physical location. After
all, we eat the food grown in that soil, we drink the water, we
breathe the air, so the place literally becomes part of us. But it's
more than that. Our moods are altered by our location. Most people
experience calmness around bodies of water, whether rivers, lakes or
oceans. Deserts are dominated by wind and sky—they give the feeling
of expansiveness and, at the same time, closeness. The Rocky
Mountains feel different from the Appalachian Mountains—one
masculine, the other feminine. Cities have a revved-up energy not
found on prairies. I remember a friend once asking me when we were
driving through the Great Smoky Mountains, “Are we ever going to
get back to civilization?” What calmed me, made him anxious.
Our personalities change
depending on our location. Which of us is not much “looser” at
the beach than in the city. We feel free in some places and
constrained in others. Our behavior changes, our activities change,
our emotions change. In many ways, we are chameleons—we melt into
our environment. In the words of the Psalmist, we are “fearfully
and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139) I love this about being
human.
Whatever location on
Planet Earth feels best to you, the place you think of as “home,”
is not necessarily where you were born or where you live now. It is likely where you feel
most yourself. “This place just suits me,” we say. “This is
where I belong.” It's the place we feel most energized. We identify
with the people, appreciate the lifestyle, and enjoy the rhythm and
cadence of the music and the speech. There may even be an element of
time involved. We may feel out-of-step with the reality of our
current time, and pine for another era and style of living that, even though we've never experienced, we somehow know would fit us. The human
mind is interesting and unique in that way—it can picture other
times and places and experience them without ever setting foot there.
What we recognize is our spiritual home—our soul's abode, and we
yearn to be there.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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