Is it the waterway that runs by your home? The iconic building visitors love? That one quiet seat with a view nobody seems to know about?
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of the word local. Some would say it’s a place of belonging, others define it as the place you’ve known for a long time... And some say local is the place you were born into. I feel this strongly with the small town where I was born (it still somehow feels more local to me than anywhere else).
Local is also the fabric of the spaces beyond our private homes. It’s where we inhabit shared places and identities, often without realising. It’s the resident birds and plants and people that seem to be in the same places at the same time. That rhythm creates a sense of knowing a place and its patterns.
Becoming local can take a long time. But it can also happen in an instant, when we recognise ourselves in the broader ecology and lived experience of a place, and feel a sense of resonance.
