I read recently that the Millennial generation cares more about experiences than possessions. This was gratifying to me, as I have hewn to that credo myself since I was old enough to understand the choice—and my two children are the tail end of the Millennials.
It got me thinking about the kinds of experience that deliver greater value than “stuff.” For me, it has everything to do with place. Some places whisper to us, shape and define us, their handiwork glacial or catalytic as lightning. Eventually our returns to them coalesce into habit, thence to tradition.
Without having to think hard about it, I can tell you the places which have exerted such influence on me that an annual visit became a “necessary embrace...beautiful as fire,” as put forth by Robinson Jeffers in the poem The Excesses of God.
Read More on the TU blog.