There is nothing quite like the power of place. Whether we stand in a field or on a shore, or merely recall a time when we did, being in a special place stirs our senses and releases memories.

Dag Hammarskjöld wrote in Markings:

A landscape can sing about God, a body about Spirit.

Setting has a diverse songbook. I asked some members of She Writes about the landscapes that stir their passions.

Kate Powell  is writing a book set in ranch country in the mountains above Santa Rosa and Napa. Here is how she sets the scene:

© Peter Weber | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Rolling golden hills (what others see as dry grass us Californians love as the real meaning of the golden state), live oaks, lupines and California poppies orange and purple, bright bougainvillea climbing across a thick wall, the smell of oaks and grass and horse and cattle and night jasmine. AND, depending upon the winds, the smell of salt air from quite far away.

The golden hills and bougainvillea on the wall speak to California’s complex history as a Mexican province and a gold miners paradise. The salty smell evokes our greatest treasure, the Pacific Ocean. The combination of these sights and smells distinguish a California ranch from any other.

Judith Newton sets her memoir Tasting Home in Laguna. Read two excerpts and you will get the picture:

Laguna Coast Real Estate – Cynthia Ayers

The road from the airport into town cut through a long, winding canyon between hills still green from spring rain,until it delivered you, as if through a birth canal, right onto the main beach. There, tan, youngish-seeming men played an endless game of volleyball against a sky that was opaque or sometimes a deep and cloudless blue. It was the sky, in part, that made you feel that anything could happen here. After living in the East, I felt like someone had removed a large obscuring cone from the top of my head.

In the end, I left Laguna, though it did not leave me, and my leaving would have nothing to do with fear of earthquakes or of the city burning. My leaving would have to do with the very imprint Laguna had left upon me. It would have to do with spirits, with talk of collective living, with restaurants suspended in time and space, with shrimp and pesto dreamily dispersed in cream and cheese. It would have to do with travel and with other worlds and with the new ideas of living they engendered. It would have to do with the baby.

Distinctly California, wouldn’t you say?

Is there a place that has the power to affect how you live your life?