themarginalian.org · 1 day ago

Barry Lopez on the Cure for Our Existential Loneliness and the Three Tenets of a Full Life – the Marginalian

Maria Popova's meditation on Barry Lopez draws from his posthumous essay collection to trace something most modern people feel but rarely name: the particular loneliness that comes from having lost our intimacy with the physical world. Lopez, shaped by decades among indigenous cultures, refuses the condescension that sees such intimacy as primitive, arguing instead that it is the very ground of meaning - that "existential loneliness and a sense that one's life is inconsequential... derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place." What he offers is not nostalgia but a quiet reorientation: that to know a place deeply is to begin to feel known by it, and that this reciprocity - to matter to somewhere - is what steadies a person against the feeling of being unnecessary in the world. His three tenets arrive with the simplicity of things long understood but seldom practiced: pay attention, be patient, and trust what the body knows. In Lopez's telling, the cure for our loneliness has always been close - rooted, literally, in the ground beneath our feet.