The book of HERE

This book is about reconnection to place. It is an invitation to a deeper internal map of your surroundings and geography.

It introduces five geographical scales that make up our experience of being here: the body, the local, the national, the global, and the cosmic.

By exploring each scale, the book shows how we can understand where we are
and who we are, and feeling more in harmony with our place in the world.

In today’s world, for some, there is a sense of liberation or separation from place: drop the local, stay in your head, choose your nation, uniform places and live in abstraction. People are increasingly moving
through online worlds, disconnected from the physical places of their life.

Our relationships with place – whether our local area, nation, planet or the universe (and our body standing in all of them) can be superficial, absent, abusive or simply a struggle. This leads to internal strife and to places no
one loves to live in.

Alternatively, this book provide us with an internal and external map to locate ourselves in a world that has upended much of what traditionally made up our sense of place and home.

This book takes inspiration and information from geography,spirituality, teachers, exemplars and pathways at every scale to illustrate the benefit of relating to the human condition in this way. Or the option to playalong with the idea and see how it goes…

This book is for those who:

- want to better understand their place in the world.

- look up at the stars but miss their feet

- love the world but struggle with their nation (or vice versa).

- know their neighbourhood but not their body (or the other way around).

- grew up or live in places without obviously strong identities, communities or stories but yearn for a deeper connection to the world.

- live in the types of places people call ‘insignificant’ or ‘the middle of nowhere’.

- live in the types of places people know and go to but who want to belong.

Without realising it, i've spent much of my life learning my geographical place. I grew up in a town without strong local traditions (although some might take umbrage at that) in a nation that is in a constant state of self-crisis (and that..), on a planet under pressure, in a universe I’d forgotten.

I am a Chartered Geographer who has sent 100s of people to work in Spain and Portugal and hosted 100s of people on tours in London, I’ve planted flowers in the street, I’m on the board of a photography charity and have 20 years of embodiment practices under my non-denominational belt.

My 20s were shaped by chronic pain the long work of making a home in my own body. A Sardinian village taught me the embrace of local life and stone circles and apples have helped me in a search for nation. A Mexican desert re-established my connection to the cosmos. Some of this book is personal but it's not just about me. It's about how me might all learn to live with a little more connection to the places or scales that shape us.

Now i'm doing a ‘Year of Here’ - writing the book, building the Agency and tracing our connection to body, stret, country, world and cosmos. Come along?