Soul Searching

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Unearth the original landscape.
The essence of a place is closely tied to its landscape. According to Gail Thomas, director of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, who studies the connection between soul and cities, settlers initially were attracted to a site by some remarkable natural feature—the way the wind blows, or the abundance of good underground water. Kansas City, for example, was founded on the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River that explorers Lewis and Clark trumpeted as an ideal location for a fort. But even though a city’s topography may have been obscured by development, maps and history books may offer a vivid image of how it once looked.

I was inspired to learn from a mapmaker how Washington’s landscape resembled the very principle of unity out of diversity that is the city’s—and the nation’s—foundation. It is a geographical crossroads where the flora and fauna of the North and the South intermingle, maples growing alongside magnolias. Most surprising to me was learning that Washington, so often described as a swamp, is predominantly a city of river terraces and hills. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who has thought deeply about the ties between soul and city for more than two decades, sees significance in the way the swamp image has found its way into Washington’s cultural imagination. He calls it a psychologically apt metaphor that captures the way our politicians’ ideals inevitably become bogged down by less noble realities.

Steep yourself in history.
Thomas Moore, author of The Care of the Soul, writes that reflecting on the past is an important part of retrieving your soul. Just as individuals in therapy or on a spiritual search discern new patterns of meaning by revisiting what they’ve experienced, so, too, does a city’s history reveal something of its intrinsic nature.

To know that the poet Walt Whitman once walked the streets of Capitol Hill after tending wounded Civil War soldiers housed in the Patent Office Building, and that the banks of the Anacostia River were lined for 3,000 years with settlements of the Nacotchtank Indians, opened my heart to the ghosts of the past still haunting its modern spaces.

Stoke your imagination.
In some way, great cities are created by the artists who render them immortal as much as by the planners, construction workers, and business leaders who build them. Think of James Joyce’s Dublin, impressionist painter Camille Pissarro’s Paris, or even Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park. Washington came magically alive when I saw it through the eyes of artist Renee Butler, who showed me slides of the city’s trees printed on large screens to express the way their lacy-leafed branches evoke the sacred. Delving into the works of local poets, fiction writers, columnists, memoirists, painters, photographers, folk artists, and songwriters deepens how we experience our home, imbuing commonplace reality with awareness, appreciation, and perhaps wonder.

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