Landscapes of the Sacred 2 Ben Houser

“But if you have proposed to someone you love in a particular McDonald’s restaurant or experienced a life-changing conversation in another, that topos suddenly becomes a chora, intimately a part of your life.” This quote if found on page 39 of the book, “Landscapes of the Sacred.” It’s amazing how common places that you don’t think anything special about, can become a place that you’ll never forget. Look in any history book, you open a page and it’s about the civil war. Pre-Civil War, the land was just land, not a bunch of famous battlefields. I imagine that if I was living back then and I walked through a field I would not think anything of it. If later I was to walk through that same field and the field was filled with a bunch of dead soldiers, I would probably remember it.
Places and things are also significant to me. I know that a Toyota truck is significant to me because a Toyota truck is the first vehicle that I have ever driven. Whenever I see one go down the road I pick up on that individual truck more than anything else on the road because it is significant to me.
My grandfathers’ farm is a significant place for me to go. His pond is different from any other pond because there I had caught my first fish. Because of that experience I had developed a relationship with catfish. For now on, whenever I catch a catfish, I refer to the first fish that I’ve ever caught.