"What is landscape? Landscape is defined as the portion of land that human beings can comprehend, and it is represented and/or reproduced in various dis- courses such as literature, pictures, and so forth. Thus the study of landscape should focus not only what has been considered as “nature” (forest, mountain, sea, and so on), and artificial structures such as building, park, and tower, but also meanings given to them and the mechanism that creates these meanings."
This is an excerpt from Matsuoka Hideaki's article on Japanese Religion and how they treat sacred space. I am not concerned with that however. In the article Hideaki presents an explanation of what landscape is to him. It is intriguing to me how we lend meaning to our own landscape. It does not live its own life away from us. We are not mutually exclusive from our environment. Belden Lane states in his book, "we live in a natural world framed by the stories we tell, though we prefer to think of it as tabul rasa. Here both Hideaki and Lane completely agree. We live in our environment based on the stories we tell about it, our view of the world is completely molded by the secrets we know about it. These secrets and stories are the only way we know how to view our world we will never be free of it. Things make sense in our world. I assume that when I park my car in the lot, when I go back to it my car will be where I left it. Why do I assume that when I turn and walk away from my car it still exists? I can not see it, is it there? I guess it all comes down to perspective.
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