Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/the-experience-of-space-the-pleasure-of-place/5015534/
How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you �" you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences �" little rags and shreds of your very life.�" Katherine Mansfield
Our first space was a person �" inside that warm, wet, dark womb that enveloped us, nurtured us, cushioned us, and literally flooded our senses. Then we burst out into the open and the roller coaster of life was on. We inhabit spaces, move through them, turn them into places �" to love, or hate, or anything in between. Ezra Pound said that poetry is language charged with meaning. Places are spaces charged with meaning. Spaces surround us �" places have the capacity to release the energy invested in feelings; we care about them and often in some sense own them, they lay claim to our memories, and often our affection or antipathy. Places shape the way we think, feel, and behave �" they influence who we are.
Space speaks
Space speaks to each of us: sometimes with a whisper, sometimes with a scream. Long corridors whisper run to a child, picket fences invite children and the child in us to trail our hands along the ...