Bioregioning — The Practice of Life Coming Home to Place.

A poetic exploration on the term "Bioregioning". Published in Meander Magazine.

A poem by Tijn Tjoelker. Published in Meander Magazine Volume 1: Returning to Place.

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Bioregioning

We have maps to everywhere
Except to our true home.

The bioregion is where
Bio and region
Life and place
Come home to each other
Like a river meeting the sea.

A bioregion is a container of life
Not imprisoned by political lines
Drawn in distant rooms
By hands that never touched the soil,
By ears that never listened to the wind,
By tongues that never tasted the watershed.

A bioregion is a country of nature
Shaped by life herself:
Through porous layers of geology, hydrology, ecology and culture.
A living fabric of rocks, water, roots, and language.

Life does not travel
In straight lines or linear paths;
It spirals, meanders, branches,
Decays and returns.
In an infinite dance.

A bioregion is a living cell
In the body of the Earth—
Its boundaries are not walls of separation,
But permeable membranes that breathe.

A bioregion is bound by threads of belonging,
Connected through a story of place,
Etched in the bedrock of deep time.

In the ocean of separation,
A bioregion is an island of coherence
Dissolving the story that separates
Me from you,
Us from them,
Here from there.

We have forgotten
How to inhabit fully—
This geographical body,
This terrain of consciousness,
This cradle that has always held us.

Bioregioning is a warm remembrance
Of weaving ourselves back into the fabric of the universe.
Of inhabiting places full of relationship,
Of coming back to life.

In the sacred marriage
Of bio and region,
Of life and place,
We rediscover that home
Was never a noun to be conquered
But a verb to be lived.

Bioregioning is not a destination,
But a way of walking—
Not a thing to build,
But a relationship to tend.

Bioregioning is the practice
Of life coming home to place.