What is it about a place?

Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance, the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart. And I will take you to the places where the ground beneath my feet and the stars overhead make my heart whole again and again. ~Oriah Mountain Dreamer

What is unique about a place? Is it the way it smells, the way it looks, the way it sounds? The way your skin feels when you are there? Is it something tangible? Is it the trees, or the dirt, or the temperature of the water? What makes a place the place that it is? For places, I think, can become like people to us. They can make us hurt, make us feel angry, make us feel used. They can make us feel safe, or loved, or wonderfully alive. They can challenge us. Like people, they bring out different parts of ourselves - they reveal different aspects of our character. But what makes that happen? What makes an inanimate location transform into something living, breathing, soul-stealing or soul-fulfilling? It isn't tangible. It isn't the trees, or the dirt, or the temperature of the water. What is it? What is unique about a place?

Is it memory? Is it the memories that we attach somewhere? Being back here, now, is a strange strange experience. For no matter how many times I come back to India, for me this place will always be associated with those I first shared it with. To me, to my experience of India, my friends who stood beside me when I first negotiated these streets are as much a part of this place as the red-brown dirt or the colorful sarees flapping in store windows. But they are not here this time - it is all different. But does that mean this place has changed? No. Not in that way, at least - but to no one else is the ground beside that certain temple alive with memories of Kara laughing, to no one else is the essence of a Kathakali dance performance Jenny's smile, to no one else does a blue mosquito net over a bed hang beside an image of Miriam, to no one else is the Yannimalai face imprinted with Katie's and Nermalraj's footprints.

(And actually, to be fair, that last memory mentioned wasn't the FIRST time I was here, it was from last winter, when I brought my childhood best friend to India with me, and I took her to climb Yannimalai, as I never had the opportunity to do so as a student, for I was sick the morning we were all to cycle there. But that's another memory attached to the place, that didn't even happen in the physical space - the memory of me coming downstairs in my pajamas at 4:30 am and standing on the stairs and holding my side and crying and telling my amma that I can't go, that she must call my Program Assistants, that I'm sick and I feel like I might die. And that memory is part of Yannimalai in my head - but I wasn't at Yannimalai, that was the whole point, I was 15 km away in the dark stairway of a suburban house.)

And now I am doing the same things again. I'm literally repeating my semester as a student, only this time, I'm here to help new students, rather than be a new student myself. So I'm actually going back to all the places I went two years ago. Lauren and I took the students to Yannimalai on Saturday. (Yannimalai - "elephant hill" - is a large rock hill outside of Madurai - from the top there is a spectacular view of the country, the villages, and way off in the distance, the Meenakshi Temple.) And now I have hundreds of new memories of the physical space - of Rachel missing the turn and cycling off by herself for a good hour, and Lauren chasing madly after her. Of Brendan exclaiming "ah! there are bones in here!" while crawling through one of the little caves. Of Mark taking in the view from the top. Of Karen, Cori, and Ambika posing for a photo, seemingly standing on air. Of three pairs of shoes sitting on the rock face, the exact point where Nermalraj had called out to Katie and I, instructing us of the correct route to go.

So has the place changed, now, for me? Perhaps, as maybe next semester, when I take a new group of students there to climb up at sunrise, the ground will be filled with memories of this semester's students, of Katie, and of the young women who were students with me. Memories, stacked upon each other like clothes in a drawer. Swirling together, mixing, jumping out at the strangest of times.

But the uniqueness of a place can't just be memory. For I had no memories of India before I came here. But from the moment I set foot on this subcontinent, something in me changed. And it happened again when I came back in December, and again this time. Something is different here. I don't know if it is me - if I have a different mindset when I come here, if I'm more patient with life in general, if I am committed to feeling more alive, if I am prepared to be constantly humbled, if i am ready to be open to whatever comes my way, if I have somehow decided that I will be content. But it must be more than me, it must be something about the place itself that resonates within whatever it is that is me, something that is here, and stays here, something I tap into when I come here. Maybe we all have places like this - places we are inexplicably drawn to, places that makes us feel whole.

I really don't know. Maybe it is a combination of all these things. Maybe I'm drawn here by something beyond my capacity to understand, and therefore I change myself to let that in. Maybe the physical place is made richer to me by my living in it, by my memories, by the stories I have lived and the stories I have been told. Maybe it is none of these things. Maybe it is all of them.

All I know is this place teaches me how to dance, in this place I can risk letting the world break my heart, and in this place my heart is made whole again and again.