Ever since reading Becoming Native to This Place by Wes Jackson back in the late 1990s, I have sought to define what that means for me. Wes defines it mostly in terms of food production, but there are also elements of spirituality and philosophy even as he writes about farming. Food is certainly the central fact of life. At its root, being native is eating from and feeding the land. From food-ways all other culture flows. Scratch the surface of an hoary book of ancient lore and you will learn what those people had for breakfast on any given Tuesday.
In true pagan fashion, I hang this embodiment of autochthony on the solar year. Seasonality, seasoning, these are the how implied in Wes’ title. Because place and time are bound together in life’s dance. Place is the material; time is the motive and motion. But at its core, my philosophy of being native to place is about reciprocity, relationship, being together, being one organism bound together on this journey that is living. Everything is part of everything, defined in terms of relationship to all else, the wheres and whens of each fragment adding to a Story of Us.
Food, time, place, birth, death, those ever-rolling waves of life, circling round the center, round the Sun if you are on this magnificent Earth, these are the sum of how you are. You are how you live, and this is spelled out in the specifics of every mundane thing you do. Eating breakfast, planting a seed, darning a sock, cradling your grandchild. You are not a personality. You are a body with a place. You can hardly not be native to where you are. Because you are part of the land and it is all of you. You are born from it, eat of it, dream in it, and will return to it. Even if you are tumbleweed, you have a place that calls to you, that will take you in.
Another book that greatly influenced my search for the meaning of life (I never grew up, you see…) was Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso. What a delightful discovery! A culture that defines what it is to know, its epistemology of being, in terms of the actual land where the people walk and breathe and garden and die. Everything is telling that Story of Us, right down to specific rocks and trees, and you can read the whole tale of your genesis on any afternoon stroll.
Of course, that tale is more vivid, more tangible, when your ancestors walked those same paths, but you can learn to be indigenous. It’s quite simple actually. Just give your ego up to the land. Recognize — and celebrate in recurring ritual — that you are interdependent with wherever you are. Then learn the stories. Read the rocks. Watch the skies. Keep the lore. Know your neighbors. Because they are part of you, human and otherwise. Especially the Other-Wise.
Become is an interesting word… it implies existence in inward motion, in gathering in. The Middle English bicomen is to fall in with, to happen upon, to move toward togetherness, to grow together, to merge. Like gravity, becoming is both binding and inevitable. Becoming native to place is, I think, interbeing, the ground state of existence, viewed through the progression of time. It is nothing you do. It is what and how you are…
So… become native. Let yourself grow roots in the actual soil of your small corner of the world, roots that nourish and feed and bind you. Become those communal bonds. For these are the meaning of your life.
The Wednesday Word
for 15 October 2025
authochthon
What does authochthon mean to you? Think about it. If you’d like, send me a quick poem or story… or just a few thoughts. If you really have something to say, maybe enter my Wednesday Word contest on AllPoetry.
And now here are the thoughts that arise in me when I think on authochthony…
autochthon
i see the glittering web
glowing with palpable belonging
i feel its pulse chime with mine
each strand a tether of care
i am born of the land
bound within the land
life its gift
life my weregild
reciprocity of being are we
i am swaddled in serenity
cradled in these stones
entangled and rooted in mother-love
nestled deep in conviviality
all i see is i-am
all i know is right
before me
all i desire is here
native to place
and all is good
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 