grass desert

I spend large swaths of time staring at the barren, brown land that is the midwest during fall and winter. The "grass desert", as my mind offered while I was driving most recently and the muted tones stood out as a wall of the pale brown horizon and the grey sky. It's not a desert in the traditional sense - there isn't sand. But it feels strikingly similar. The asphalt blending with the grass to create a perfectly harmless image for the eye. There is no strain to look at it, no single thing brighter than anything else. Even the wildlife that remains matches: cows in dark browns and warm blacks, horses blending with hay and mud, birds with feathers that disguise them.

A lot of people hate it, though I think they just hate the cold and not the absence of life.

But it's not really absent is it?

It is just dormant.

And maybe I find that aspect of it relatable. The periods of time in which nature is active and green and producing things that are beautiful — it has to be balanced with time spent at rest, recuperating, enduring the hardships of the winter. Productivity and creation cannot be sustained without consumption and quiet.

In the winter, I often feel my most lethargic, my most incapable of movement in a creative sphere. It feels less difficult to admit I am in need of rest, when the world is resting too. When the grass desert is there to remind me a rest is natural and necessary and nothing to be ashamed of. The things that go dormant (my hobbies, my creativity, my overall maintenance of my mortal form) always eventually return. They are not lost - they are just asleep, waiting patiently for the kindling that will bid them back.

Like I said, I spend a lot of time here. I feel like it makes sense that I am oddly drawn to it. Finding solace in it.

This environment that so perfectly mirrors the cycles of my own mind.

the same view, over and over and over, broken up only by trees

I started out my life being driven through grass deserts to visit family, the perfect backdrop for daydreaming and letting thoughts flow. Making a game of following the yellow pavement lines with my eyes, or counting mile markers, or noticing a new section of trees. Mindless, easy activities that preoccupy the visual senses while my mind concocted stories and ideas usually inspired by whatever novel I had finished reading over the course of the drive.

As an aside, my affinity for staring out the window and saying nothing for several hours because of the strength of my daydreams perhaps should have been a sign that I likely have inattentive ADHD but that is neither here nor there.

The most interesting thing you'd see was a cow, if you're lucky. Or a dilapidated barn left half-demolished and you get to spend the next minute or so contemplating it: How did it break? Who left it behind? What was it like in its glory?

The questions spiral further, so long as the barn is in view: Were the people who lived there happy? Where are they now? Were they sad when they left, or was it time for them to go? Will they ever return?

And then the grass consumes your field of vision and the train of thought is lost. Not out of malice, not with intention to disregard, but simply because the field is now empty and the barn is a few miles back and you will have those same thoughts every time you drive by it; slowly turning the history of the space in your mind for a few minutes at a time over the course of years.

Now I am the one driving myself through the grass deserts.

Still daydreaming to the same degree I was before, the time passes so quickly I am shocked when I arrive at the front door to my childhood home and realize the drive is done. In moments of lucidity amid the grass desert, I feel like the coil of a nautilus, or a cochlea, the experience folding over in on itself to be simultaneously new because I've never driven this path before on this day, but also familiar because I've driven this path many times within the history of my existence. And not necessarily the path specifically, but just the overall essence of the grass desert. I have seen it for so long.

When I am in it, I am at once that young child again, overjoyed at the prospect of time where I am not forced to be productive, where I can just think and think and think and delve into daydreams. And I am also the adult I have become, my daydreaming more complex, rooted in reality, but colored with the hopes I've always had. The echo is there, existing like a Matryoshka doll of these same eyes admiring the grass desert with the tenacity of a child and the nostalgia of an adult.

Truly, they were right: time is a flat circle.

This repetition of existence is something I find beautiful, just another cycle like the seasons. I love these moments where I am coloring experiences with the lens of the child I still cradle carefully within me. This part of me that loves the grass desert, it is all her (and me, because she is me, and I am her). I am very, very aware that she is there. I refuse to let her go.

dormant and brown but home

Monotony can be beautiful, if you choose to make it so.

If you look at it with the right eyes, at least. It doesn't have to be the lens of the inner child; it can be the lens of an artist, or a biologist, or whichever conceptualization you wish to ascribe to yourself for the trip. How gorgeous, that it all is so consistently the same! Just as it is difficult to be different, it is also difficult to be the same. For brief periods (or lengthy periods, the winters are long, the grass deserts linger) there is consistency, and then there is change.

Even if there are things that are unique, if you take the trip often enough, they also begin to blend into the background. Becoming part of the sea of muted colors that flow past the window, not noticeable unless you choose to take notice. On my usual interstate commute that I take (about) once a month, there is exactly one thing that I look forward to seeing. I've seen it at least fifteen times at this point, and I am making the conscious effort to see it. And it is so painfully mundane:

A wind farm.

It doesn't stand out from the distance, and at night it is almost impossible to realize you are driving through it unless you know what that field of blinking red lights is.

But when I am driving through it, staring up at these giant feats of human construction, I feel small and little again (the child in me pulled forth again) [cycles, so many cycles]. Watching the blades turn overhead, knowing energy is being made even amid the cold weather and the grey sky, I am enraptured by it. Letting myself be wholly present as it commands my field of vision for that brief time I get to travel within it.

The off-white, warm-white, manufactured-white, aged-white of the thick columns supporting it in itself telling a story of careful choice by someone lost to history. The lazy rotation of each turbine's blades like a gentle wave, offering greetings and farewells. The mundane becomes marvelous - it's just a damn wind farm. But I love it.

And I love the grass desert it lives in.

i love you