Living landscape: An autoethnography

This study explored the living landscape experience within a narrowly defined place, using autoethnographic methodology. The method connects the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political. It is fundamentally transformative and involves interpretation through the subjective lens of the researcher. The researcher's own nonfictional essays belonging to the nature writing genre, served as primary data source, and as window into the highly personal lived experience. A heuristic self-research procedure was used to access the data that dwells within the self, the I-who-experiences. Thereafter, the essays were grouped based on insights gained during the heuristic data analysis. Relevant literature from philosophical and eco-psychospiritual living landscape perspectives was used in conjunction with the data to support it and enhance the meaning of the lived experience. Photographs and voices of nature writers and poets were woven into the manuscript to provide an embodied story that engages and invites the reader to actively partake in the study. The researcher concluded that prolonged immersion within the living landscape reveals deeply rooted vulnerability, which serves as gateway to holon experiences. Such experiences radically transform the self reconciling it with the human and more-than-human world and repositioning it in a field of interrelationships. Holon experiences influenced how the researcher identifies with nature and experiences spirituality. Vulnerability powerfully mended the split between the self and nature