Prairie

A Return To Nature

A red winged blackbird sways on his cattail perch and trills an alarm at our passing. The dirt trail through the pasture is uneven, rutted by the footfalls of traversing sheep passing this way, season after season, for more than two decades. Flanked by tall summer grasses the trail is barely visible in this stretch passing the wetland. The dogs trot along in the tunnel created by feathery seed heads bending over the path. The grass is holding morning dew and dampens their coats and my jeans. The phrase start where you are, use what you have and do what you can is running on repeat while I walk. We travel on, leaving the low spot and cresting a hill and here the grass is short and sparse and paler green, a diluted version of the thick abundance in the low spots. The dogs fan out, the young pup zig zagging in excited exploration, the elder dogs scenting and peeing on important tufts of grass. No dwelling is visible from this hilltop, only endless yellow ochre prairie, distant yellow canola fields and cattle. We have been walking a straight path for half an hour and still haven’t left our property.

My morning walk is such a steadfast routine I am often in automatic mode and if it were not for tittering birds, screeching insects, or dead pan silences grabbing my attention I may not even realize what I have walked in or through. That is not to say I have taken this place for granted, far from it. One of the reasons for walking every day is to count blessings and spread thanks. But what I am guilty of is forgetting there is anything extraordinary in the everyday lived experience, and thereby dismissing that living outside of hustle and bustle culture, with an abundance of prairie outside my front door, is worthy of sharing.

There are a number of essays showing up on substack written by women who are leaving corporate jobs in exchange for a slower paced, authentic life. A life with different freedoms than corporate money and prestige bought them; a calmer pace that allows for some measure of return to nature. It piques my interest that leaving corporate dictums behind isn’t the only commonality, every one of them writes about welcoming more nature into their lives. It has dawned on me that I live the sort of plain jane life surrounded by nature many of these women are seeking. Not so much in matching detail for detail of curated homes, two point two kids and salon nails, but certainly matching in desire for nature, peace of mind and regular doses of control over one’s time. To recall that I am right where I love to be and have been there all along is a miracle of sorts; a veiled miracle, in the same category as grasses growing. Critical, necessary, forgiving and freely given if we only open our eyes. I see anew that the everyday experience of living quietly and un-corporately is my area of expertise. Nature is profitable to our soul. The birds, the sheep, the dogs, the prairie – they are tangible surroundings bearing the intangible reasons. Harmonizing our lives with the nature that is around us, even in tidbits, shapes our authenticity, and thus shapes who we become, at whatever juncture in life we may be at. A return to nature is a return to ourselves.

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A Prairie Place Sans Social Media

I determined some time ago that cell phones do not jive with this reclusive prairie space and there is very, very seldom a valid reason to take mine along on my daily walks. With no phone at hand, social media does not exist while in this prairie space either. I began to notice how exquisite not scrolling on a screen felt. This noticing would often be followed by rounds of internal questioning about why social media was in my life if its absence felt so good.

two dogs on prairie trail

One morning, well over a year ago, I decided to not post on instagram that day. I did the same thing the next day, and the next. I had already been down a rabbit hole of researching the impact of social media as the current models are set up, and I was angry at myself for succumbing to the habit. But after days of not posting I figured I had made a mistake. I was lost, I was ‘disconnected’. I was feeling very much left out, particularly as an artist trying to find my way through marketing. But each day as I walked the dogs out on the prairie I would feel the ‘rightfulness’ of having no social media concerns there. I hung onto that feeling of rightfulness and stuck by my decision to not post. I picked up a physical paper book to distract myself and discovered just how short my ability to focus was, and how badly I missed reading books. After a few weeks I hardly missed IG but what stood out stronger than ever was the continual push by the rest of the world to prove one’s validity by being on social. This has not ceased at all.

I had plans to replace posting on IG with diving deeper into other online avenues, like this blog, but I ended up walking away from all of it. I stopped writing my newsletter regularly, I nearly stopped posting to the blog, and there have been no posts to pinterest in forever. I had no clue what this state of emptying out was about, although in hindsight, I think it was a means of debriefing where I was going and what I was still interested in doing. Unexpectedly, that debrief took many months.

Without social media and with a lot less screen time in everyday life, I have long focus back and I have additional time to spend in my studio. A corner of the kitchen counter has become the landing place for any recently acquired books, awaiting a read. Falling in love with reading again, lead to encouragement for writing again. I have joined a local writers group; where meetings with people who are physically and mentally present take place, sans phones. And when I am in my studio, instead of logging on to an app I log-in to my sketch book, a habit that has done more for my drawing skills than any other. I’m now dabbling in watercolor painting. I’ve been more creative in the last year than in the past three. No video reel has been made to document any of it and it will not see the light of day on social media platforms. But the local community is seeing the best parts of it, and that feels far less fraudulent.

Felted wool artwork
‘In Companionable Silence’ / Felted wool artwork

Fifteen months later I’m still opting for digital minimalism in my life, or to put it another way, applying the approach I use on the land to being online. One must always consider the whole, not just the parts. When and if the time comes for dipping a toe back into social media, I’ll know what to watch for, I’ll know that my creative self will not break when I walk out on the rat race and take the scenic route.

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Prairie Allure

Two dogs walking in prairie grass

The sky is a blanket of gun mental grey, the wind is barely there. Tinted by frost the yellow and burnt oranges of the grasses are more grey than gold.  The trees are leafless.  No sunlight shines and no shadows are cast.

The landscape of prairie stretching outward under the flat sky is beautifully composed with an opulent silence. No sound is being made and yet every sound is being heard. The trail for one leading onward is alluring. The dogs and I walk long and deep because it is what the morning calls for. And with the walking perspectives are realigned and purposes are recharged.

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