Cozy stone cottage nestled in a meadow, tall grasses (er, goldenrod!) blowing in the foreground, sheltering trees in the background - it's universal in its appeal! - a hermitage, a pioneer's home on the prairie, a fortress against time. If this one place pulls you back, calls to you, it's special in ways that transcend our conscious knowing. There's de ja vous and ancestral memory (Jung) or the collective unconscious; there's reincarnation to consider as well, though I discredit that concept. I have the same kind of feeling about cliff dwellings and caves. I could swear I was a dog in a den, in some former life. :) The one time I ever saw Wyoming, I felt "I'm home!" as we crossed into the eastern border on our way to Cheyenne. I'd never been there before but it felt so familiar. Maybe we read a book that brought these places to life for us. Fairy tales. Pictures that storm inside our heads. It's an awesome photo, and I wonder if you should go see if this stone cottage might be for sale. :) Your name may be all over it, so to speak! #loveit
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The title of this curated anthology - pictures that storm inside my head - comes from Dave Etter's poem, "From a Nineteenth-Century Kansas Painter's Notebook".
The one thing that I love about you is that you are never at a loss for words. I now know that I would love to live there. Interesting about how you felt like you were home in Wyoming even though you have never been there before.
you're too sweet!
I suspect The Wyoming Effect had something to do with all the Westerns I've read. Except I read mostly Zane Grey, whose setting were mostly Arizona desert. Something about the vast rolling plains of the West felt so familiar. Good writers of historical fiction do a lot to infict upon us a sense of de ja vous when we visit places they've described - cobblestone streets, stucco houses, tiled roofs, candles behind window glass warped with age - reading Dickens must have made it seem like we were really there, so what we pictured in our imaginations as we read may get confused with memory.
I'm thinking someone else already wrote about this so I won't have to, but my internet searches haven't produced a hit so far.
Instead of past lives to explain de ja vous, surely we can credit good writers...