Chap. 8-Landscapes of the Sacred, Laura Boleyn

Chapter 8 tries to help the reader understand the struggles that Americans have with space and place. Americans are always trying to find a place to call “home” for comfort but when it is found often feel enclosed and trapped. They also struggle, as Lane suggests, to accept sacred place as ordinary. Instead, many Americans associate spiritual with a private, never public, place that is “mystical” and is “intellectually consistent and reasonable.”
Many Americans also struggle with place because it is hard to define, always changing and subjective. A place is never the same twice because the experience is always different the second or third time, and is always changing. The place is as you remember it but memories are always changing, especially if the place is visited many different times. Because it is always changing, place is how our mind and body remembers it.
People are always looking for an attachment to a place but this is always contradicted by their craving for change and for the freedom of movement. As Lane states, Americans experience “a tension between spaciousness and containment as a universal dialectic in human experience.” I do not fully understand the meaning of this statement but I do understand as Americans wanting to be in one place but then feeling confined by it. People want the comfort, security and community of a small town but at the same time they feel constricted by it and want freedom. Also, they want privacy and want to be closed off from public openness and common areas.
Lane also discusses the importance of place and the “relationship of imagination and place in human experience.” Imagination is important in the experience of place because it is specific to the person experiencing place and because of “the otherness it bears.” This is important because there is so much unknown in place and space, and, as it seems John Kirtland Wright believes, it is an important piece in understanding mystery of place. To encounter God and experience place, one must demand a high level of imagination and “disciplined insight.”