The places we know and love, and thrive in, are so important. The smells, sounds and feelings connect us to these places. The place becomes a part of us. It does so because it teaches us something, about the world, about ourselves, about life. These teachings in and of places are so important because they are our roots for learning. And while we go away and find new places, plant new seeds and new roots grow, we can always return to the places of our history. We can find them again physically, spiritually, intellectually, and they grow anew for us and in us.
So, if places are a part of us, are we a part of places?
I believe we leave something of ourselves in our places. We do not only draw on them. We share. We share ourselves with these places that root our lives, that give meaning. Our experience of these places and our stories of them leave an imprint on the places themselves. As our stories intersect other stories and other places they weave together and our place becomes another’s in another way.
In this sense, we exist in a loop where the stories of our lives and the places we are become part of the stories of lives and the places they are.
So we must find places that become us, we must find this deep way to learn and experience and we must help others to this experience and learning.
I Q'd 
I too believe the presence of a loop: the flow of interconnectedness between places and people. I firmly believe we leave a piece of ourselves, an element of our souls, in places that meant something to us, where we embodied the understandings of the land. There are places I have a strong connection to where I can strongly feel the presence of others, sometimes people I know sometimes I don’t. But, when on the land, still and using all my senses, the land shares its whole story and connects me to a greater web, a large piece of weaving, that I am a part of and now connected to. At times, I purposefully go to a place because of that feeling. To feel belonging to others through nature.
I am wondering if the same loop occurs when the land is being used as a “task scape” rather than being interacted with, or embodied, as a “landscape” to use Tim Ingold’s terms (see his article “The Temporality of Landscapes” from 1993)? Do we leave elements of our souls, or parts of ourselves, when using a place as a venue for other activities? Do we leave the same “imprint” then or is it a different kind of imprint (maybe a more physical one)?
It is so important that place-based learning is part of the curriculum, I agree. What can we do as educators to embrace new ways of learning (as you wrote: “this deep way to learn and experience and we must help others to this experience and learning”)?
Thank you for sharing your thinking which is stirring some thinking in me.
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