That Field like My Mind, Was Immeasurable
Bridget Steckis
The sod farm was infinite as I lay in its center and felt as if I were melting into the earth. I’ve lived in that same town since I was five months old. The thick, sweet smell of a familiar place is something that is invaluable. Country roads I know by heart, secret paths down dunes to sit on the beach.
My attachment to the actual natural surroundings of my hometown is something I have not contemplated until recently. However, now that I have it has given me a much greater perspective on the world in itself. I never took the time to realize how much of myself I’ve actually invested in the outdoors or what that truly means to me.
In contemplation, it’s intriguing for me to think about my morphing concept of solitude in relation to the natural world. One should ask themselves, what is it to be alone? If it’s to merely be unaccompanied by another human, I’ve come to believe that this is a severely narrow designation. I realize that I have adopted a Thoreau-esque state of mind. Transcend laws, think critically and create your own definitions.
The cohorts that I have found in wildlife, agriculture, even the sky have opened my mind to the notion of isolation. To believe that you are alone while amidst hundreds, if not thousands, of beings and concepts is simply to be unconscious. However, people grow up fearing the idea of being by oneself. There is such a negative stigma attached to seclusion that people oftentimes shut out what may seem to them like obscure possibilities. This blindness is caused only by human’s bitter and perhaps cynical view on the subject. Someone can become so focused on attaining the companionship of their own species, that they take the world for granted. If nothing else reader, I beg of you, don’t ever take for granted the limitless dimensions of your own mind.
Through both reminiscence and introspection, I now justly appreciate how being alone with nothing but my thoughts and the cool feeling of slick grass against my skin was a blessing.
My memories of the past and hopes for the future are what link to me to the land. Remembering the feeling of sitting in the middle of that sod farm with a notebook and pen, on an idyllic spring day, makes me wish that every single person had the ability to experience that state of mind. There’s just something about the center of a field, no houses in sight, half a mile of green in every direction that will wash a surreal sense of euphoria over a person. It’s strange that I could forget how much something once meant to me; sleeping in my subconscious somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.
Through this, I hold two converse views of the environment which illustrate the complexity of the natural world as well as its ability to have an effect on us. It is false to think of nature as inanimate. It’s something which lives, breathes and possesses a soul. As humans have the ability to sit down and articulate thoughts in order to express our voices, nature expresses its voice as well. However you must listen for it, stop to specifically see it. Once we are able to use these skills to help interpret nature’s spiritual voice, that is what allows it to touch our species in such a profound way.
A soul is not something merely triggered by death. Many may speak about the concept of a soul during periods of mourning, like death is a fracture in the body that releases this ghostly figure which both thinks and feels. To me, nature’s soul is more of an omniscient sensitivity which simply exists. It hangs in the air. It is the unexplainable feeling you get when sitting in your heaven on “earth,” whatever and wherever that may be.
The main point here is that the contradiction lies within this soul. One facet of nature’s persona is what we see as its merciless and unforgiving ability to cause pain and destruction. Our realization that nature is something which we cannot harness is difficult for some to come to terms with. It is inherent within our character as humans to desire control. We want to direct our lives and everything within them because we like to feel that we are the masters of our own destinies. When that is out of our control, we tend to become angered by it, and to a certain degree, understandably so. Something massive such as the infamous hurricane Katrina, for example, which killed and destroyed so many lives, is difficult to overlook. It’s not easy to sympathize with something that causes one pain, no matter what it is.
In Stephen Crane’s short story The Open Boat, Crane exemplifies both a profound understanding and respect for nature and its capabilities. “It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual -- nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws of his life and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance.”
He depicts the reality of our situation in that it is not the cruelty of nature which humans cannot accept; it is its utter indifference which we do not want to allow. Nature is not a physical being which thinks, and solves and makes decisions. That is what separates us from it, our ability to contemplate and its lack thereof. Instead, it is a force all its own, whose soul does not rationalize, just feels and experiences. It does not have intention, only action. This species has spent our existence coming to terms with living on earth, a small dot in the spectrum of the universe which we do not own.
On the other hand however, there is this innate feeling of protectiveness I have for certain minute parts, little corners of this world which have impacted me. All of this is a circle, which for me, leads back to the sod farm.
My personal journey as a writer finds its beginnings on those sod farms around the time I was ten years old. I was denominated then, by my parents, as responsible enough to ride my bike alone to those fields where I could sit, or play or write. I started with a marble notebook, where I kept my “secret thoughts.” I don’t believe I was doing any sort of profound thinking then, but I was thinking nonetheless. In the field and in that book I recorded my new found freedom, which in a young child’s life is the first step in their spiritual development. That sod farm for me symbolized the birth of my independence and the beginning of my emancipation.
Only now in retrospect am I able to objectively look at both that location and my frame of mind at the time. That field meant everything to me. I used to lie on my stomach and look straight out over the plane of grass in front of me as I tried to inspect each individual piece. Like its own microcosmic civilization, each blade is different yet the same. I remember exactly how they felt to the touch, a harmonious mixture of both soft and sharp; and how after an hour they left a chaotic imprint of red lines on my skin.
Then the building began.
Right around my 16th birthday they started to make headway on the construction. When the brightest hues on that landscape were no longer green, but now yellow, I knew something wasn’t right. The cold metal of the bulldozers juxtaposed the soft ground that once nurtured my moldable childhood mind. My heart was then encased in an old wooden elevator and I distinctly felt the last tendrils of its pulley system snap. As it freefell from the top floor, my stomach did a vehement dance leaving me sick and bewildered. I felt as if that place in my memory was being locked away inside a glass box, which I could always see, but never again touch. Their conquest was being erected on top of my freedom. I found it ironic that to construct “Meadow Crest” they completely demolished one in the process. I was livid.
This was what I felt I had to protect. However, in reality it was less like something I had to do and more like an impossible wish I had come to possess. My lamentable helplessness was the difference between the two. A “place” is something which should be held sacred. Place being an umbrella term for any specific location which becomes close to someone’s heart.
When people are “protecting” nature, it brings one to contemplate what exactly they’re protecting it from. In our country at least, someone might say that they want to shield it from being eaten away by the capitalistic minds of our citizens. Those who have revenue on the brain don’t think about nature as a soul possessing organism. To them it’s nothing but a would-be profit. To that group, it is not what a place means to anyone else, but merely what they can siphon from it.
Unfortunately for them, those conquests will never be as rich as memories. People will have countless experiences in their lives, but the occurrences which actually succeed in reaching deep into its holder’s chest are what will come to be valued most. When it comes down to it, this has to do with our hearts and the keys which we find have the ability to unlock them.
When someone finds they are able to invest so much of their Self, the true spiritual caverns of their psyche into something, it becomes cherished. It is a location’s staying power in the mind which calls to the heart for safe guarding. Memories may become diaphanous; they are things which without the proper upkeep have the ability to dissipate from ones conscious. This fact definitely influences the way we value the physical origins of those memories.
While recollecting the emotional reminiscences of my field, I now know that they are precious and I revere them so. I work overtime to truly bring myself back to the way I felt, in order to be able to convey it honestly. I may not have been the savior of my sod farm, but the feelings which the event evoked in me was, in its own way, natures means of teaching me a lesson.
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