RSR ~ ESSAYS

A shoot of new bluestem pushes through the tangled mat of dead and desiccated overburden in a prairie.  Chance suggests it might be eaten by some organism, beaten down by a hail storm, or consumed in a runaway wildfire before it can produce its robust head of seed.  Perhaps there can be no consummation; the climax of harvest, the harvest of imagination, the imagining of new relationship, without exposed vulnerability.  While deep roots sustain us through our vulnerable journey to fruition, without that tender reach into the perilous unknown, even our roots would eventually die for lack of sustenance.  Less exposure in the calculus of relationship, we think, equals less pain, and so we hope by strategic retreat to become invulnerable to that unpleasant possibility.  But grasslands do not spread this way, nor perhaps can we stretch into new romance, new communities, or new ideas.

There’s a kind of fullness that presents itself as emptiness.  The mind, the heart, the skin can grow so satiated that they can’t take anything else in.  In that overwhelm, we’re suspended in time and space, numbed to everything new that comes along – fullness turned inside out into emptiness.  At their remote edges, things might sometimes turn themselves into their opposites.  In such places, polarities may find coherence and coexistence.  Humanity splintered the prairie’s integrity, but in the process of naming the rifts we also may become more capable of knitting it together – and ourselves along with it.

Somehow, my hobo dream, my sister's struggle through cancer, and my hopscotch journey through prairie remnants intertwine like some braided river sloping down to the Gulf.  Indeed I must go on living, even if my sister fails to.  What I discover from prairie paradox crisscrosses the borders between opposites, where death renews itself in life, solitude restores a sense of belonging, and my questions become perhaps their own answers.

As I stood earlier today at the edge of a central Iowa corn field, gazing west over miles of rattling stalks, while a river of grackles undulated from one stand of black locusts to another of sycamores, with the ululations of crickets and cicadas serenading soul and sounding the soil, I felt suffused with an unaccountable substance.  Born of the grasslands a hundred thousand generations ago, gradients of fullness and emptiness, open and closed, deep and shallow, aloneness and belonging shifted constantly with the wind clattering through the corn.  In such a way, I transcend polarity.

In many locales, the sublime soil has eroded to a shadow of its deeper self.  Have prairie souls eroded as well?  Skin of soil – skin of soul.  The industrial plow tore through the skin of these soils, but also shredded the soul of this place.[iii]  Commodity replaced diversity as the underlying ethos.  There were freedoms lost when the sea of grass was stilled and drained.  Perhaps the clear-cutting and commoditization of prairie land has also clear-cut and sold out our ideology, religious tolerance, grass-roots politics, and economic sustainability.  Perhaps in restoring our relationship to prairie places, we need a soil worthy of the soul we desire.

If landscape processes form a kind of ecological consciousness, then can a place that loses more than 99 percent of its original integrity still claim to possess a mind of its own?  And if the soil fundament of this region has been irrevocably changed, have the souls of the people who draw sustenance from it been inexorably altered as well?  Here in this bread-basket of the nation, any of us that eat from the Midwest’s provender are implicated.