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Archives for September 2019

The Solitude of the Prairie

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“The prairie, these plains….It was as if nature had taken solitude and fashioned it into something visible, carved out the silences into distances, into short grass forever flowing and curving, a vast sky forever pressing down, nothing changing, nothing but sameness, day after day after day, as far as you could see, as far as you could go. It was like the solitude of God…as awesome, and as beautiful.” from Johnny Osage by Janice Holt Giles

the green prairie

Seeking the solitude and healing of the prairie, I drove my wretched self to my Mom’s place. It’s not an endless prairie like the early 1800’s of Johnny Osage’s time, but there is still enough around to calm my nerves and soothe my soul. Seeing cattle out on the grassland adds another layer of calm and ‘right-ness’ to my world.

There are certain sights that are so familiar to me, almost to the point of not noticing—like the cattle standing around the dirt perimeter of a ‘stock dam’ dug out of the prairie grass. Every stock dam, slough, creek, and lake were filled and overflowing with all the rain that has fallen, from Spring thaw until this late summer. There was more water and more fallow fields (from flooding) than I have ever seen in eastern South Dakota. Too much of a good thing. Too much for normal boundaries to handle.

Late summer is the perfect time to appreciate the beauty of the prairie grasses: the maroonish-red of Big Bluestem, the delectable native grass that is like ‘ice cream for cows’…

the golden-brown of the tall, sturdy Indiangrass…

and the wispy green-gold of Switchgrass.

Old barb-wire fencing rolled into a neat circle hung on a gray corner post. Electric fencing is taking over boundary patrol for most cattle pastures, it seems. But the words cattle and prairie cannot be put together without the iconic image of the rusty wire and gray posts.

Another prairie grass, shorter in statue than the above three, is Sideoats Grama. The small oat-like seeds hang on one side of the grass stem.

Alfalfa and Sweet Yellow Clover are other haymakers found among the grasses. These legumes add more protein content to all-grass hay.

No prairie pasture picture is complete without a standard barb-wire gate attached to the fence post with a tight, smooth wire. If in a vehicle, the passenger usually ‘gets the gate’; on horseback, we used to take turns.

On the post that anchors the barb-wire gate is an old weathered board. It used to display a ‘No Trespassing’ and/or ‘No Hunting’ sign. In other words, ‘Stay Out.’ This is private property; this protects the cattle who live here.

Rarely is it one event in our lives that brings us to our knees—or takes me to the prairie. Usually it is a foggy-morning-freeway-pile-up of things that descend upon us. We are built to be resilient to the many physical and emotional assaults that we experience in life, but at times, it is too much for our normal boundaries (and bodies) to handle. We need familiarity, protection, good nutrition, sleep, and solitude to ‘right’ ourselves, to calm ourselves, and to heal ourselves. That’s what the prairie does for me—the awesome and beautiful solitude of God.

When I Wasn’t Looking

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How much does the internet rule our lives? What would we actually do without it for a day, a week, or a month? (Maybe I should back that up to an hour also.) Even those of us old enough to remember that we had full, awesome lives before the internet, get caught up in the necessity of it. Like when we weren’t looking, it sort of took over our lives. This post began in my head more than a week ago and ended a week ago when I could not open my webpage to upload pictures and write. Not enough power or signal, or there was interference or disturbance. Whatever.

After Paul’s memorial service over Labor Day and sweet times of relaxation and mourning-tempered fun with the Brake family, we headed home to Minnesota. Our wrecked hearts were a little less wrecked, bandaged over with hugs, precious memories, and laughter. The healing had begun.

On the trip home, we stopped for a walk and a break at Sakatah Lake State Park near Waterville, Minnesota. It was a nourishing detour around the rush-hour Cities traffic. The first thing I noticed when we started walking were dark, leaping little toads all over the place. It had rained quite a bit while we were gone (and much of the summer), so the frog and toad populations were booming.

Upper Sakatah Lake was full to the rim and evidence of flooding was everywhere. Trees along the shore had toppled into the water, and debris was high in the lower spots. This area was named Sakatah by the Wahpekute tribe of the Dakota Nation. It means “the sights and sounds of children playing on the hill,” and sometimes translated to “Singing Hills.” Don’t you love that!?

Looking out over the lake, the most striking view was to the east where Double-crested Cormorants had perched and made nests in dead trees on tiny islands of Wildlife Management Areas. Cormorants are colonial nesters and often perceived to be messy, nuisance birds.

They are fish-eaters, so do not make good game birds, and their community living seems to make them messy and troublesome. (For whom?) But we saw much preening and cleaning going on as they perched in their alabaster tree-houses together.

The vegetation in the woods had decidedly turned to Fall. It seemed to happen when I wasn’t looking. Clusters of red-fruited seeds of the Jack-in-the-Pulpit, amid the tattered leaves, shouted out to passers-by after two seasons of discreetly hiding in the forest.

Sunflowers, Asters, and Goldenrods grew from every sunny spot along the edge of the woods, and juicy Wild Plums hung from the trees.

The forest gave way to wetlands and prairies as we hiked along the Singing Hills State Bike Trail that traversed the Park.

It was a short but welcome break to get into the woods after driving the Interstate for hours through the fields of Iowa. And when we were home again, our Fall visitors began to boldly traipse through the yard. The Wild Turkey population seems greatly diminished this year—only four babies with two, sometimes three females. Other years we have had twelve to eighteen young ones trailing behind their mamas.

The spotted baby fawns are now big enough to graze in the open and look for apples that have fallen to the ground.

Our surprise this year, is that there are triplets!

This Spring and Summer have slipped by me—when I wasn’t looking—when insidious, unseen influences sort of took over our lives. We blindly believe that all-or-nothing technology is in our best interest (all=good, nothing=bad). But what are we losing in the process when we are complicit to the ‘lifestyle’ of the internet and our ‘smart’ phones? How have we isolated ourselves from our community of people for the (and I don’t know the word for this exactly) thrill/ satisfaction/ seduction of all that the internet supplies? I spent many days in the last two weeks not looking at the internet. It was a relief. I’m not so attached to technology that it was uncomfortable for me to do so. In fact, it actually felt like I became more of myself. As the Brake family mourned the loss of a Dad/ brother/ uncle, we didn’t do so on social media—we did it in person. It was the face-to-face, the tears and laughter, and the hugs and stories that sustained us. When we weren’t looking for it, the healing had begun, and we were a little bit less wrecked, thank the Good Lord. So, where are the disturbances in our lives? What interferes with us feeling like ourselves in a grounded, nurturing way? I say don’t let the power in our lives be about the internet—it is unsustaining and in fact robs us of our energy and creativity in the long run. We need more Sakatah in our lives—the sights and sounds of children (and we are all children of God) playing and singing in the hills.

Wrecked

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A week ago Thursday we loaded the van and were on the road at the respectable leaving time of 5:30 a.m. Chris was ready before that, and despite the fact I had hardly slept a wink that night, I was still the one who ‘held us up,’ so to speak. We headed south to Missouri on I-35, this time for Chris’ brother’s memorial service. With wrecked hearts we drove much of the time in silence—Chris glad to skirt most of the rush-hour traffic in the Cities, me trying to catch up on a few hours of sleep. We were close to the Missouri border in Iowa when I woke up because we were stopping, right on the Interstate behind a long line of cars and trucks already stopped. Not creeping, not stop and go, but stopped. We idled for awhile, then longer, but when truckers began to get out of their trucks to stretch their legs, we turned off the car and opened the windows and then the doors. Two massive semi tow trucks passed us on the right shoulder—it must be a huge wreck. We waited for over an hour. A trucker came up to talk to us—he said a semi had jack-knifed to avoid hitting a car, and there were a couple of cars that had gone into the steep ditch. Amazingly, nobody was hurt. He checked to see if we needed water or anything, then went on to talk to others. When we finally got going, we slowly drove by the wrecked tractor-trailer, saw the driver securing things as it lay on the tow truck, saw the huge ruts in the median where he had reined that big beast of a semi to a skidding, sliding stop, saw the police cars, etc. We wanted to see what had disrupted a major highway and so many people’s lives for that ‘long’ of time.

But there are times when we don’t want to see the wreckage.

On our trip to Lake Superior and then Wisconsin in early August, we planned to stop at Pattison State Park, just south of Superior, to see Wisconsin’s highest waterfall. The Black River begins at Black Lake, 22 miles southwest of the park. It drops 31 feet over Little Manitou Falls at the south end of Pattison.

It winds its way into Interfalls Lake with its necklace of Cattails and Swamp Milkweed.

From the lake, the River flowed through a spillway under the highway; we walked from the welcome center, past the old CCC buildings, and through a tunnel that also went under the highway. The park worker told us that hiking trails around the lake and to Little Manitou Falls were closed due to severe storm damage and flooding over the summer of 2018. Large swaths of the park were wrecked from the storms of over a year ago. Some cleaning up and re-building had begun, but the damage was everywhere. Orange caution-fencing roped off areas that were too dangerous to navigate. Large chunks of macadam from the washed-away highway and trail were scattered all over at the topside of the falls. Water had gouged away the soil and plants from the side of the tunnel, the spillway, and the River. Exposed tree roots, like ghost towns, reminded us of what once was. I didn’t want to look at the wreckage; I wanted to see the beautiful falls. So I tried to ignore the wreckage, even as I stepped over it. My camera was pointed only at beauty.

We took a short trail through tall evergreens to the fenced-off precipice. The falls were nowhere in sight, but a little Fir tree with its candle cones caught my eye. The cones were adorned with dripping, hardened sap, lighting up the cloak of greenery around it.

We backtracked to the other side of the River where another short trail led us down to a wooden platform that hung over the rocks to view the white-water River.

At one point the water disappeared into the dark, basalt rock, the ancient lava swallowing the brown, tannin-rich water. We walked down to a second platform and finally saw the full glory of Big Manitou Falls!

The hard igneous rock contained the powerful water that had wreaked havoc on the soil, trees, and highway above it.

The Black River slowed and calmed as it wound its way through the bottom of the amazing gorge to meet up with the Nemadji River for their final leg of northern travel to the great Lake Superior.

So what does one do in the midst of wreckage, whether of heart, health, or home? In the face of overwhelming rubble, I cry. We are built that way; our physiology uses tears to reduce stress and process emotions. Often we need silence and contemplation after the chaos of wreckage in order to work through the myriad of feelings and oftentimes skewed thoughts that our brain’s negativity bias wrongly confirms. Cleaning up after the wreckage takes time. Sometimes a long time. We need to allow the process to unfold, not force it—it’s like sleep, in that way. As much as we want to sleep at times of unrest, we cannot force it to happen, but we can do things to allow it. In the midst of wreckage, I, like this Mourning Cloak Butterfly, feel the need to hide, to camouflage my wounded self, to remain roped off from the precipice that seems too dangerous to navigate. My emotions and body feel raw and exposed at the loss of what once was.

We step into our futures and relationships with good intentions and hope—that is probably not true for all people, but I would hope that for most. We begin with a clean heart and a strong body. Our humanness is like the water of lakes and rivers and falls—it is the wreckage and the beauty of our lives. Love is the rock that contains our humanness. It is what helps us step over the wreckage as we move slowly forward, even when we can’t bear to look. Love is what allows us to finally confront the wreckage and the reasons behind it, when we can. Love is what cares for and sustains the wounded and dying in the midst of heartbreak and grace. Love is what gives us the strength to get up in front of a crowd of people to tell the story of a brother, even as our hearts are wrecked by his death. Love is the light that guides us as we wear the mourning cloak. Love is the foundation for all we have been and for all we are going to be.