We often forget that relationship extends beyond human interaction. Have you ever considered your relationship to home and location? That is your Kith. Kith is defined as a relationship to place, an intimacy between you and the land you live on. Your Kith is the places that shape the landscape of your life; your house, yard, your favorite restaurant, the path you walk to work or school, and the tree you like to sit under every sunny day.

To bring your awareness to your Kith, your environmental relationships, is to deepen your connection with your surroundings and begin to recognize how these places shape us.

Sara invited me to the stables where her family boards their horses. She brought me into their love of nature through their relationship to their animal kin. We spent the session wandering the stable yard and surrounding fields, marveling at the sudden storm clouds that ushered in reminders of the coming winter. Sprouting canola anxious to take the place of the freshly harvested wheat were weaved into bouquets by small hands like they were precious flowers. The kids climbed on hay bales and horse backs, and we ended the session with returning the horses to their corrals and family pictures against the stable wall in front of an interesting bush with pretty leaves no one had thought to pay much attention.

There is so much beauty in your everyday; so much beauty in the spaces you occupy on a daily basis. We don’t have to find the golden-lit field you’ve never been to, or take expensive trips to the mountains (unless you really want to). Nostalgia comes from lived experience and a longing to return to the places that held us.

Let them hold you. And bring me to take pictures.