In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes Belden Lane describes habitus. Habitus denotes the intimate connection between spirit and place. Belden writes that this connection, “..is hard to grasp for those of us living in a post-Enlightenment technological society. Landscape and spirituality are not, for us, inevitably interwoven. We experience no inescapable link between our “place” and our way of conceiving the holy, between habitat and habitus, where one lives and how one practices a habit of being. Our concern is simply to move quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another. We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit.

“We have lost the ability even to heed the natural environment, much less to perceive it through the lens of a particular tradition. Modern western culture is largely shorn of attentiveness to both habitat and habitus. Where we live – in what we are rooted – no longer defines who we are. We have learned to distrust all disciplines of formative spiritual traditions, with their communal ways of perceiving the world. We have realized, in the end, the “free individual” at the expense of a network of related meanings.

“Without a habitus – particularly one that is drawn, at least in part, from the rhythm of the land around us – our habitat ceases to be a living partner in the pursuit of common wholeness. We become alienated from an environment that seems indifferent, even hostile. Habitat turns into scenery, inconsequential background. Habitus is reduced to a nonsacramental, individualistic quest for transcendent experience. We lose any sense of being formed in community, particularly in a tradition that allows us to act unconsciously, with ease and delight, out of a deep sense of what is natural to us and to our “milieu.” We are, in short, a people without “habit,” with no common custom, place, or dress to lend us shared meaning.”