We are the Dreamers of Dreams

This past Thursday I drove across Northern Missouri towards Quincy, IL to participate in a close friend's wedding. It was a hot, Midwest summer's day, without a cloud in the sky, and the land passing by me was a blend of yellow and green. The entire expansion of Hwy 36 runs through rural farming country, and as I drove, the barefoot 6-year-old tomboy in me ached to run through the hot stubbly fields of dry grass and undergrowth.

As my paternal grandparents are no longer alive, I have very little reason to make the trip back up to my father's rural "home country" that I considered my home away from home for so long. It had been the one permanent place I'd had my whole life, and it is days like that one that make me homesick for the simpler things in life. As I drove, I envisioned exploring along the creeks with my brothers, riding my bike down the winding country roads, and tagging along as my dad helped out with whatever harvest was in season. Just as I had that last thought, I passed a combine pulling up to a stop sign with a young child standing next to the driver, and I smiled. I passed a small beaten down cemetary out in a lone plot with one of those wire gates around it, and thought about family. Not sadness, but togetherness. Days later I came across this quote and thought it pinpointed exactly what I was feeling:

"I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling." ~Jack Kerouac Dharma Bums

It seems to me that time is so much more evident when you are alone in an expanse of countryside.. and you are so much more insignificant in that moment to time and all greater purposes. Suddenly you are not an important being, but a mere creature on a crust thousands of millions of years old. The land is so old and powerful, it is a being of its own. I craved to sit on one of the hillsides to soak in this spirit again. I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem Renaissance: "God, I can pull the grass apart and lay my fingers on your heart." I wanted to be one with the earth again. To hear the incessant chirp of crickets across the prairie and the wind through the grasses. To let the sun soak deep into my bones. We are not meant to be fixed to one pavement. My restless heart craves the majesty of these wide open spaces.