Category Archives: Landscape

#2 Esperanza

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Darlene Martinez, age 63

MM: Can you tell me about where you grew up?

DM: Okay, well I was born in Tampa, in an area called Ybor City. And Ybor City has a very interesting history; it was an area where Spanish and Italian immigrants moved to in the early part of the 20th century. So the whole community where my grandmother’s house was, the businesses, the banks, … it was so, what I think of as European, with little neighborhoods, with corner stores! Where people actually went and did their grocery shopping, with a butcher, a special cheese counter, and just the basics, fruits and vegetables. I only lived in Ybor City for the first 5 years of my life, but those five years were obviously really important in my life because I spent most of that time with my grandmother. And my grandmother was from Spain, from Northern Spain, from the region of Asturias. And the whole neighborhood where she lived was Spanish people that had immigrated to Ybor City. And what was so cool was that all the houses had these big porches and every evening, the women would sit out—mainly women, there were a few men in the neighborhood, but mainly women, maybe all the husbands had died? My grandfather died when I was 10; he was 20 years older than my grandmother. But people would visit each other. They’d go from porch to porch and stroll on the sidewalk, and I think that’s very European. I don’t think that’s an American thing. Also, there were a lot of Cubans that had come to Tampa and they had started cigar factories there. And the cigar factories were also in Ybor City and very near my grandmother’s house. Every morning, there would be all these people walking to work to the cigar factory, and the women would all be in their shortwaist dresses with pocketbooks and the men had their guayabera, a style of shirt worn a lot in Cuba, their cigars in their pocket, and you could just see them going to work and coming home in the evening and everyone would just be “Hello” and very sociable. There was a park, two blocks from where my grandmother lived, where they played baseball in the evening, and a pool. It was just a great neighborhood to grow up in, well I wish….I always used to wish I had spent more time there. I used to go back and spend my summers there.

MM: But you didn’t leave Florida, right?

DM: No, I did not.

MM: So you grew up all in Florida?

DM: From Tampa, I moved to Orlando, from 1st to 5th, then we moved to Merritt Island, and I went through high school there, and then I was married. I never left Florida until 197… oh, probably 72, when my husband got a job in Washington, D.C. We moved there with the three kids and we lived in Maryland and Virginia and then went overseas to Iran and we were there in 1975, 76, 77, moved back to Florida, and then we went to Holland for a year, and then when we came back from Holland, we got divorced…. (laughing). I was married—how many times—two times. My first husband was from Ecuador. He was an exchange student that I met when I was in highschool. And then my second husband was from Cuba.

MM: So when did you move to Bozeman?

DM: Oh my gosh, Bozeman, I didn’t move to Bozeman until 1991. After I got divorced, for those ten years I was single and in Florida.

MM: Why did you move to Bozeman? Continue reading →

The Great Gulf

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It’s been almost seven months. People tend to forget. People always move beyond disaster to what feels urgent RIGHT NOW. Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast continues to dribble, lurch, pick up pieces, pray. Hundreds of journalists descended on this story. Having never stepped foot on the Gulf Coast, my tangible insight is nil. Instead, as a way of remembrance, I offer this snippet from a recently published piece by Terry Tempest Williams. You can read the whole of it (and you should) here at Orion Magazine. It’ll evoke a deep sorrow in anyone.

“So what’s the story that isn’t being told?” I ask.

“Two things: how much oil actually has gone into the sea and the amount of dispersants used to make it disappear,” she says.

“The workers are getting sick with contact dermatitis, respiratory infections, nausea, and god knows what else. The BP representatives say all it is is food poisoning or dehydration. If it was just food poisoning or not enough water, why were the workers’ clothes confiscated? As we say in these parts, Answer me dat!

“I never really got nervous until I got a call at nine-thirty on a Sunday night from the BP claims office telling me to back off. But I’m speaking out. I kid my friends and family and say I’ll leave bread crumbs. The other day, two guys from Homeland Security called to take me to lunch. I’m a chef. They tried to talk food with me, to cozy up and all, and one of them told me he was a pastry chef.” Margaret shakes her head. “But I knew what they was up to, I’m not stupid. They just wanted to let me know I was bein’ watched.”

“Here’s the truth,” Margaret says, now emotional. “Where are the animals? There’s no too-da-loos, the little one-armed fiddler crabs. Ya don’t hear birds. From Amelia to Alabama, Kevin never saw a fish jump, never heard a bird sing. This is their nestin’ season. Those babies, they’re not goin’ nowhere. We had a very small pod of sperm whales in the Gulf, nobody’s seen ‘em. Guys on the water say they died in the spill and their bodies were hacked up and taken away. BP and our government don’t want nobody to see the bodies of dead sea mammals. Dolphins are choking on the surface. Fish are swimming in circles, gasping. It’s ugly, I’m tellin’ you. And nobody’s talkin’ about it. You’re not hearing nothin’ about it. As far as the media is reportin’, everythin’s being cleaned up and it’s not a problem. But you know what, unless I know where my fish is coming from, I’m eatin’ nothin’ from here.”

In 2010 alone, there have been major oil disasters off the coasts of China, Australia, and India. The people of the Niger Delta are drenched in oil, at risk physically and politically, every day. Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged for his protesting voice. And in 2009, forty-seven indigenous communities were decimated by an oil spill on the Santa Rosa River in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. Our consumption of oil is murdering life.

“Our consumption of oil is murdering life.” Strong statement. True statement. So much of what we do is murdering life. By living, eating, or bad-mouthing anyone, you are stabbing at life. That is the life cycle. But doesn’t our disassociation with oil spills arise from what we can’t see? (For example, New Yorkers can’t physically see beyond the skyline and they are notorious for forgetting that worlds exist beyond New York.) Most of us aren’t deep sea divers. We don’t see the watery world below. Globs of oil on the beach don’t quite do it. They horrify us for a moment and then we go back to checking our email. I’m not sure how we change that,… though I’ve boiled it down to the thought that all living beings are, by nature, localized. What touches you personally will hold your attention.

Whispers

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Okay, it was either a blog about the latest New Yorker article on the ridiculous reality of leaf-blowing wars in the suburbs of California, or, it was this:

An 18-month-old baby was found alive in a clump of trees on Pagai Selatan island on Wednesday, The A.P. reported. –New York Times

This week in Indonesia, an underwater quake (magnitude 7.7) created a 10-foot tall tsunami that crashed onto the archipelago, specifically the Mentawai Islands, the most underdeveloped area of Indonesia. I had never heard of the Mentawai Islands [though, my husband, Mr. Photographic-Memory, just smirked, "I've heard of them, near Sumatra, big shipping lanes, you know ....]

Some of us are less spatially gifted.

When I discover a place for the first time, I ask myself to say the place name out loud–men-ta-wa-i. It’s a way of engraving it correctly into my awareness, of humanizing a place, of reminding myself again and again that there are many people living many existences on this planet. Hundreds of people were swept away by the tsunami; 16,000 people were displaced; and yet that little baby flew into the air and was caught by a clump of trees.

Mentawai Islands (one of the non-tourist-surfing images from google)

My question:

What are the whispers echoing through that community right now?

Is it different to be ravaged by the winds/fire/water of your homeplace than by, let’s say, soldiers with guns fighting a war? Likely.

Do these whispers have a different cadence than those post-earthquake in Pakistan or Haiti or San Francisco? Are they different than the whispers of the Carteret Islanders (near Papua New Guinea), the first official environmental refugees who relocated, reluctantly, to higher ground in 2007?

I suspect not.

Imagine all those whispers–grief, forgiveness, awe, disbelief, surrender, reverence, anger–directed at the ocean. And what would the ocean say?

Are You A “Flâneur”?

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Oooooo. This word is alluring. Thank you to Samantha Dabney, dear friend and landscape-architect-in-the-making, for sharing it with me.

In my scan research of the word flâneur, I found these definitions– a stroller, lounger, saunterer, detached observer, a person who walks the city in order to experience it, gentleman [or gentlewoman] stroller of the city streets, one with a tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation, one who takes on the role of understanding, participating in and portraying the city.

After the 1848 revolution in France, when modernity became a “thing” and the modern city transformed into a space for investigation, Charles Baudelaire breathed life into this word, gave it meaning.

The best definition Baudelaire offered for a flâneur was…

“a botanist of the sidewalk”

I love that. I used to walk 80 blocks or more in New York City (sometimes in slushy dirty snow) just to look up and around, just to pass from neighborhood to neighborhood and feel the shifts. That never changed. The longer I lived there, the more I wanted to explore.

Walter Benjamin ruminated that the flâneur, like the concept of a tourist, sprung from modern life and the Industrial Revolution. Of course, Susan Sontag, another hard-to-crack brilliant intellectual, also had something to say about it:

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’

But I still go back to BOTANIST OF THE SIDEWALK.

Are you a botanist of the sidewalk?

Ahupua’a and Pre-Thought

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My friend Laurie recently sent me this short email. She’s a transplant to Hawaii.

Ahupua’a: look it up.  You won’t regret it.

I looked it up. I do not regret it. Ahupua’a is genius. It is an ancient Hawaiian land division system from an ancient Hawaii where all land was public. Each ahupua’a was a wedge-shaped area of land that ran from the uplands to the sea, following the natural boundaries of the watershed. Because of the variety of terrain, each ahupua’a brimmed with resources–from fish and salt, to fertile land for farming taro or sweet potato, to koa and other trees growing in upslope areas. Imagine this. A villager from the coast meets up with a villager from the uplands area. They trade fish for wood to build a canoe. They are part of the same ahupua’a. Each ahupua’a functioned as a broad self-sustaining unit.

Imagine that.

That required pre-thought.

Where is pre-thought in American society? I guess we don’t need it because our resources come from almost everywhere but here. Of course, that will change in my lifetime. Environmentalist author Bill McKibben is famous for saying that the 21st century is a time for making friends with your neighbors. When you run out of milk or gas or food or energy, you might need some good old-fashioned help. You might also be called upon to return the favor. Or as a Maine couple did two winters ago, invite your neighbors to move in and spilt a heating bill four ways.

But until that point, we remain “grabbers.” Individualists like to grab.

This is mine. This is also mine.

Okay. I love being an individualist. I love not martyring myself in the name of religion or duty or obligation. I love being able to live in relative solitude with my husband and my dog. I wake up every morning feeling grateful for the privilege of choice. But I also value community and the radical decisions made by a group that shares needs. What if I traded trout from our overgrown shady creek for the flowers my neighbor Marcie can grow on a desert plateau that gets sun all day long?

For all our democracy, Americans just don’t pre-think. We dash out to the frontier, stake a claim, and work very hard to make sure our nuclear family is fed. Then we go to bed. That’s the dream we’ve digested. We wouldn’t dream of anything else. I’ve never been to America’s Hawaii. But my father was born there. I now have four dear friends who have lived there. From what I’ve heard, the ahupua’a system is, obviously and sadly, a thing of the faraway past.

Topophilia

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In 1961, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan introduced the term Topophilia. It sounds either like a love potion or an intoxicating disease (one could argue those are the same thing). But it means, in literal translation, love of place. Or as Tuan explained it, the affective bond between people and place. “Place” can vary in scale: a room, a creek, a town, a nation, the ocean.

Where has that word gone?

It’s such a cool concept. I’d love to see a contemporary filmmaker revive “topophilia” and shepherd it towards a mainstream audience. Imagine a film where all characters are suddenly struck with bouts of topophilia; either they go manic obsessive crazy or, in one flash, we have a world where people actually care about their surroundings.

I once saw a man with a topo map tatooed on his forearm. My friend Dani has a topo map engraved on her wedding ring. It’s a mountain range she and her husband love.

What feelings of affection do you have for your habitat?

Some places I love: a particular willow tree in Spain, the steep bike-riding street in Mexico City, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the porch of my yurt, Cider Mill Road in Vermont, the field of enormous “power towers” behind our house in Texas, a silent adobe monastery in Pecos, New Mexico, a tiny attic restroom in an internet cafe in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Foot

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I inherited my father’s feet–flat as a pancake. I always knew this about myself. But the fact resurfaced when I started daily yoga classes and my teacher said, “Girl, that is your homework. Lift those fallen arches.” Now I do every asana with my toes lifted because that action engages my arch. I stand in the shower with my toes lifted. I sit at this computer, lift my toes and press my big toe mound down. Ten months later I’m starting to see the muscle of my arch lift … slowly.

How had I (a person teased for being too body-aware) forgotten this place on my body? For 31-years I have crawled and walked all over the world and never once thought about toning my arch. 

Our feet are our foundation. They get us to where we are going. As the author of Born To Run explains, our arch is like a stone bridge. It doesn’t need a support (i.e. orthotic) beneath it. It needs to rely instead on the potential strength of its beautiful architecture. But this workhorse–the foot–seems forgotten by most non-athlete modern people.

Like a country backwater, the foot is the least “glamorous” place. We pay little attention to it because it is not directly responsible for things like procreation. That’s the role of eyes, lips, sex organs, chest, hips, butt, legs. People aren’t checking out each other’s feet.

Feet rarely provoke reverence.

It is bad manners to step on entrance of a Mongolian yurt; Jesus washed his disciples feet as a humbling gesture; many women sacrifice the health of their feet by cramming them into a pair of high heels which tilts them forward into an anatomically sexy position; before entering a Mosque or Buddhist temple, you remove your shoes; Pearl S. Buck’s main Chinese character in The Good Earth admits his disappointment at being matched with a wife whose feet had not been bound.

One exception: Chinese medicine, where the foot, like the ear, maps the entire body.

If we look at body as landscape, everything depends on our feet.

What are other forgotten places?

East of Eden (and Generalists)

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I sat myself down this summer and read John Steinbeck’s classic East of Eden, a book numerous friends had thrust upon me.

It consumed me. It didn’t make me feel all that great.

It’s a hard and long story. But the writing was sparse and dead-on; the land-based theme was systemic; and Steinbeck’s understanding of humanity, as always, was accurate.

And the character Lee, a philosophizing Chinese servant, won me over. He mulls around in the background, pretending to be invisible and dumb, but he is the catalyst for so many of the big shifts in the story. He is the one you want to yank out of the book into real life and ask, “So what do you think about this, Lee? Can we share a cup of tea? Tell me more about yourself.”

He offers this:

“Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what a specialist misses—the whole world over the fence.”

What does that have to do with place? I think America is a land of specialists, or at least we are encouraged to go that route. I wonder to what end. (My father, who grew up abroad, once told me, “You have two choices: You can be American and define yourself by your work. Or you can be European and define yourself by your community.) I get the efficiency of a mob of specialists. If I go under any knife, I want that surgeon to be a specialist, not a dabbler. But, not everyone has to be so fine-tuned, and why must fine-tuned be labeled as better? I spent my 20′s looking desperately for the ONE GLORIOUS THING to devote my life to, to steer towards, to become. That process felt strangling. Only now am I slowly unbraiding that belief. And I do this by watching teachers. Teachers are the great generalists. They devote themselves to learning–not only about one thing, but many things.

Gertrude Stein Dishes It

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Found this quote today. Gertrude Stein–articulate genius of her time. In New York City, I used to stroll by her statue every morning on my way to work. [Note: It was the first public statue of an American woman to be installed in NYC]

Okay, we know Gertrude can get wordy. It might take you two go-arounds to absorb the quote, but there is something there. Her words shocked me because I agree with them 100% and I disagree with them about 100% too– so I’m floating somewhere in space trying to sort out that confusion.

“After all, anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.”

Illuminated Journaling

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I said goodbye to my dear friend Sam today. She’s headed back to graduate school and her study of landscape architecture. Her pen&ink drawings of landscape inspire the same verbal exclamation in me each time: “I want to paper my walls in these!” She sketches anything she sees–quickly, slowly, in broad strokes or detailed, any place from Dubai to Patagonia to Martha’s Vineyard. I once asked her to draw a “landscape that changed” for me. See below.

This visual cataloguing reminds me of writer/naturalist Hannah Hinchman and her illuminated journals, most notably, “A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path To Place.” Check it out. I’d love to see this kind of detailed observation applied to a variety of places. Hinchman, who looks to nature, might draw a fox burrowing in the ground. What about a city dweller drawing a person digging out of the trash or a throng of people gliding across the street? What about a library full of illuminated journals from millions of people across the globe?

It’s exterior might be a Gaudi rendition and we might call it….

THE LIBRARY OF ILLUMINATED JOURNALS.

Unproductive and…

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What does productive mean? I’ve been battling with this term and the legacy of it during my past year–one of catapults and false starts in the world of self-employment, writing all day everyday and maintaining my fairly simple and solitary life in the woods.

We grow up learning that we were born to produce. It goes hand in hand with survival. Someone urged us to be productive, or else __________ (fill in your own doomsday blank). Well, being productive does feel good. It assures us of our identity. I think; I do; therefore I am. It leads to change. It pays the bills. It is motion.

It is also a mask, because somewhere along the line, produce became dependent on quantity, not feeling or depth. It got skewed. We began to define ourselves by what we do, instead of how we exist. What’s the first question you ask a stranger or a stranger asks you: “So, what do you do?” Try replacing that question with “So tell me, who are you?” at a party– guaranteed you’ll shock the hell of that person.

In her new book “Dawn Light,” natural history writer Diane Ackerman slams it down:

Monet simply proclaimed, and adored, what we all experience from moment to moment: the wash of sensations that greet us on waking, and which we try, at our cost, to dismiss as wasteful, self-indulgent, unproductive, or by some other term designed to separate us from our true self. The freedom of unbridling that self and losing it in nature is immeasurable. [my bold]

Her sentence is the antidote for my personal guilt.

I used to slink into my new garden, hoping that my disciplined self didn’t notice. I used to sneak away to crack open the spine of a new book and secretly “indulge” myself in literature, as if it were cocaine. I used to feel anxiety overtake my exploratory hikes through pine forests. The refrain in my brain: I sure as shit shouldn’t be enjoying this delightful thing; I should be producing work. What an awful way to live, especially when I live in a natural place that blows my heart right open.

What if tending to your senses is being productive? That might start a revolution. I can already hear the voices of some of my dear loved ones: “You mean make time for joy, for real play, for seeing how my body responds to my surroundings? But I don’t have time for that?” Well, John Muir made time. He tied himself to the high limb of a tree and lived through a vicious thunderstorm just to see what it felt like to be a tree limb in a storm. Why not?

I might not have written the 3,000 words that I planned for yesterday, but I wrote 1,000 words and, guess what, it was fun. Then I learned something about the world and myself when a Great Horned Owl landed on the porch. I padded outside to sit on my haunches and do nothing but stare at it (for long lazy minutes I didn’t keep track of)– eye to eye.

The Great Migration

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Which one, you ask?

Migration, as a word, conjures up these things in my mind: birds, nomadic lifestyle in Mongolia, Ellis Island, the Somali immigrants in Vermont, the hot desert of the Mexico-Arizona border, or, for a numeric example, the 11,500 forgotten people who emigrated from Ireland to Argentina in the late 19th century. The causes of these large scale movements? Famine. Job loss. Economics. Oppression.

But I rarely consider the rarely documented within-country migrations–and I should. This week the New Yorker reviewed “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson. The book chronicles the migration (or exodus) of six million black Southerners to an unknown life in the North and Midwest. Jim Crow had just stuck its teeth in. I imagine what this fleeing would look like on a time-lapse–the scattering and trickling up of so many terrified families.

I have yet to read the book, but the way Wilkerson chose to tell the story is brilliant. She profiled three people “that no one has ever heard of.” Through those individual narratives, she tells the story of six million. Like… Ida Mae Brandon, who started her life in a one-room school-house in Chickasaw County, Mississippi where she picked cotton and killed snakes. At almost 85 years old, she attended a neighborhood-watch meeting at her Chicago South Shore Presbyterian Church and listened to a younger Barack Obama explain what state senators do.

What struck me most is this snippet of Ida Mae recalling the moment she stepped off the train and took a glance at her new home.

“What did it look like at that time, Chicago?” Wilkerson asked.

“It looked like Heaven to me then,” Ida Mae said.

As a young person, I often romanticized the leaving of place. (What would it be like to say goodbye to your homeland, knowing that you would NEVER see it again?) But in so many cases, it doesn’t matter. You are going wherever you can, as long as it is faraway from the place you came from (because place includes human impact on others).

Wherever you land is heaven. It is a new start. Its demons are different. Its people, you hope, are different too.

Pakistan, Floods, Pakistan

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A few days ago, The Editors of BBC News explained why, four weeks after the fact, they are continuing coverage of the Pakistan flooding.

The disaster phase hasn’t come to an end yet.

They also created a “Lifeline Pakistan” program on the radio with essential information (food, water, check points) for victims. It might be the first humanitarian act by a journalism conglomerate. Outside of aiding with survival needs, perhaps the most empowering service is the toll-free phone call where victims can record their stories. Within the first few hours, 800 people had called in to share a story, most of them pleas for help.

I wonder what kind of stories will emerge once the flood waters have settled and Pakistanis gaze over their swamped rice (sugarcane, tobacco, maize) fields, crumbled homes and destroyed infrastructures. I hope someone will be there to collect those stories, to remind the world that THIS happened, that its effects are long-term, and that real live human beings suffered. I don’t know about you, but when I hear “2.5 million people affected”, I have a hard time zooming in to the individuals that makes up that cloud number.

The article closed this way:

After four weeks, the main question now being asked is how we are going to sustain interest in the story. It needs no elaboration how important Pakistan is in terms of geo-politics. There are already discussions and debates as to what end this massive disaster will change Pakistan. This is something we will be focussing on soon after the acute phase of the disaster is over, and once the country enters the reconstruction and rebuilding phase. So the story will not go away.

You gotta love them for being blunt Brits, but are we truly admitting that we (the general public) lose interest in a story unless that country affects us geo-politically?

I guess we are.

Perhaps that’s why the United States has never cared about any of the 47 countries in Africa, or the broad sweep of South America, or a faraway island like Papua New Guinea.

Why Are We Scared?

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Where I live, a path leads up a steep forested hill to a plateau. I walk there daily, even though, on the average hour, this path scares the hell out of me. I holler “Helloooooo to the animaaaals” as I hoof it up to the top, and at night, I carry a headlamp and flashlight. I glance behind me every 3.5 seconds. I am scare of what should be there, of what I know lurks nearby. I’ve seen mountain lion prints on the path. I know black bears are around. So really, I am scared of the creatures, not the path itself. But the path is the venue, so it becomes the thing I fear.

Today, on September 1st, with temperatures dropped to 55˚, I consider the start of autumn an appropriate time to try to let go of this fear.

Children’s books teach us that forests are usually haunted, or too mystical to contend with. The places that scare us are the places that threaten our existence. So what if I get taken out by mountain lion claw? I would be nourishment for another animal. Not a bad way to go.

But, let’s be honest. I do care.

What kind of land shape makes a place scary to a human?

It has been noted that, since humans presumably evolved on the African savannah, we prefer a savannah type landscape—a perch from which to look across at an open area with a few trees for shade. Of course this “savannah hypothesis” has been agreed to, disputed, or downright made fun of. What do you think?

What feels like an ideal and safe landscape to you?

Cardinal Directions and Language

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I didn’t apply cardinal directions to my life until I was 19 years old, sitting on a mountain top with my boyfriend (now husband) as he told me what unfolded to the East, to the West, to the North, to the South.

I had never needed the compass rose. My family moved every two to three years. We never stayed in a place long enough to get to know it, or long enough to orient ourselves in that space. The New York Times recently ran an article called “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”

The author, a linguist, starts with this simple concept:

Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.

Then he uses the Guugu Yimithirr, a remote Australian aboriginal tongue from north Queensland, as an example of a language inseparable from cardinal directions. The people who speak it have an internal compass that operates all the time. And what struck me most is how, given their spacial orientation, the prominence of I, somehow fades away:

But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.