Essays

We all—every one of us—live in many places.

For those of us who belong to this particular virtual neo-tribe, we live part of our lives in that communal hallucination we call Utata. Our lives in Utata are fuzzily defined by words and images—by what we say, by how we say it, and by the photographs we elect to share.

With this project, we expand the borders of our Utata lives. With these photo-essays we move from the collective to the individual; we invite each other to share a deeper awareness of where we each live.

Since Utata manifests itself in ways that are entirely independent of any geophysical existence, we cheerfully acknowledge that our members may define the term “live” in unexpected ways. Indeed, we anticipate it. Many of us live in traditional settings—home of some sort, maybe in a town or city, maybe in the country, on the side of a hill, near livestock. Some of us make a life in the lives of other people who live where we live, or the lives of the people who lived before us, and in the lives of those who will remain after we’ve gone. A few of us live in our biographies—who we are is where we live. Several of us live in the memories of where we once lived, or in the boxes that move us from where we used to live to where we’re going to live next. We live in the rituals we perform—in the making of tea, in the morning run, in the books we read. Not surprisingly, many of us live in the expression of ideas and emotions—in music, in mathematics, in art. Most of us live in many places, in overlapping concentric circles of place, memory, biography, and ideas.

We live wherever we find nourishment for the spirit. This is where we live.