I was born in a small town in northeastern Arizona by the name of Holbrook. At the time I was growing up there, the population barely topped 5,000. That now seems to have been near the crest of the ebb and flow of this small town. Today little more than 4,000 hardy souls are left. The young flee, you see, as soon as they are able, to seek out the grand adventures of life. And those grand adventures lie somewhere OUT THERE, in the bigger cities and towns of our land. It's an old story.

Myself, I was completely taken in by the assumption that my small town, like all small towns I thought, was stifling, was boring, was empty and uninteresting. There is so much to see, OUT THERE, so much to do, so much stuff. That was really the problem, in retrospect, not enough stuff to keep a young mind interested. I always assumed that this was because of some absolute poverty of the cultural and physical space of my small town. Everybody knows, after all, that there's not as much stuff in a small thing as there is in a big one. Or so I thought. Turns out I was wrong. Also an old story.

Through the experience of living in a series of progressively bigger and bigger places I finally figured out that all places are the same size.

When I lived in Los Angeles I discovered that although there was lots and lots of stuff everywhere I looked, only so much of it would fit into my mind at any one time. When I lived in Phoenix, same story--smaller town, same sized mind. And now whenever I go home, I marvel at how rich and full and satisfying the experience is. There is no more stuff in Holbrook than there ever was, less even perhaps of the kind of stuff which can be weighed and counted by the physicists. And yet my mind is just as full as when I lived in Phoenix or L.A. My sense of place is just as abundant.

I finally figured out that when I lived in L.A., of the 10 billion or so place-events which comprised L.A., I filtered them down to the quantity which could be handled by that part of my brain devoted to sense-of-place. People living in small towns simply expand their 10 thousand or so place-events, if need be, to fill that same mental cupboard. Mentally, our sense of place expands or contracts to fill the available geography.

So it turns out there are no small towns after all. All places are plenums.