Thank you for the word 'Solastalgia" (it reminds me a bit of the word "saudade" from Portuguese = a kind of home sickness for the numinous, which I suspect may be partly what one feels at the loss of a river or stream.
Interesting timing - I don't remember what moved me to do it, but I just took a google maps "tour" around the neighborhood where I grew up, a small town in northern New Jersey.
I was surprised by the intensity of sadness i felt when I saw the little brook/stream behind the house where I grew up was no longer there.
I did several thousand disability evaluations when I was living in South Carolina, from 2003 to 2010. One of the most frequent themes I heard was teh sense of dislocation people felt as largely rural areas were displaced by suburban and urban sprawl.
I distinctly recall the sadness on one man's face when he recalled the farms and wooded areas where he used to roam as a child in a certain section of Greenville, SC.
That area is now the infamous 'Woodruff Road," miles and miles of big box stores and cookie cutter malls, an area which induces a kind of stupefaction just driving down the road.
And thank you for the poetic beauty of your writing. Quite moving and evocative.
Don, thank you for sharing these very real, very visceral examples of what solastalgia can look like. It sounds like you probably heard loads of gut wrenching stories from folks while doing the evaluations. I wonder how life is for those people, now ~20 years later.
I did an evaluation of an 18 year old autistic teen; later his mother wrote to say the report was what they needed to get him disability compensation. She stayed in touch over the next 6 years and I heard how valuable it was for the family to no longer have the enormous financial stress they had had - particularly since she was a single mother who adored her son yet struggled with the amount of energy it took to care for him.
From what I've heard in general, receiving government support without any opportunity to give back is among the hardest things. Hopefully humanistic, transpersonal and existential therapy can one day (sooner rather than later!) provide insights as to how we can profoundly transform our society.
I love this.
Thank you for the word 'Solastalgia" (it reminds me a bit of the word "saudade" from Portuguese = a kind of home sickness for the numinous, which I suspect may be partly what one feels at the loss of a river or stream.
Interesting timing - I don't remember what moved me to do it, but I just took a google maps "tour" around the neighborhood where I grew up, a small town in northern New Jersey.
I was surprised by the intensity of sadness i felt when I saw the little brook/stream behind the house where I grew up was no longer there.
I did several thousand disability evaluations when I was living in South Carolina, from 2003 to 2010. One of the most frequent themes I heard was teh sense of dislocation people felt as largely rural areas were displaced by suburban and urban sprawl.
I distinctly recall the sadness on one man's face when he recalled the farms and wooded areas where he used to roam as a child in a certain section of Greenville, SC.
That area is now the infamous 'Woodruff Road," miles and miles of big box stores and cookie cutter malls, an area which induces a kind of stupefaction just driving down the road.
And thank you for the poetic beauty of your writing. Quite moving and evocative.
Don, thank you for sharing these very real, very visceral examples of what solastalgia can look like. It sounds like you probably heard loads of gut wrenching stories from folks while doing the evaluations. I wonder how life is for those people, now ~20 years later.
I did an evaluation of an 18 year old autistic teen; later his mother wrote to say the report was what they needed to get him disability compensation. She stayed in touch over the next 6 years and I heard how valuable it was for the family to no longer have the enormous financial stress they had had - particularly since she was a single mother who adored her son yet struggled with the amount of energy it took to care for him.
From what I've heard in general, receiving government support without any opportunity to give back is among the hardest things. Hopefully humanistic, transpersonal and existential therapy can one day (sooner rather than later!) provide insights as to how we can profoundly transform our society.