From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece.
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After a while the park opens out into a long drive through the prairie. There is 2% of wild prairie left in the US and this is most of it. The sky is grey and the clouds low, and there is a long wooden walkway leading into the grass. We slip and slide on the ice out and out and out, until we stand with the land undulating around us like we’re standing on top of an ocean. The sky seals up the edges of our sight. I hear only the sound of my heart, the breeze on my cheek, trickle of water and the joy of small birds. There is no hum of humanity, no airplane or car noise. I think of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who is from a town nearby, and imagine for a second that I too am living in this world of prairie. A thought comes through about how much writing I would get done if I lived here, but I can’t hold on to that imaginary scenario long . I have a sense of the wind coming from the edges and I am aware only of expanse of mind, expanse of sky, the opening in my chest that seems to have become porous. For a moment, I am the sky, the plains, a stalk of wheat that feels itself blown through with the wind of time.
It occurs to me just how different we are now, and what is gone. I don’t forget that living in a cabin in a prairie was probably terrifying much of the time, with the fear of starvation and weather and illness and other people. But how often does this pure connection happen for us now, and how much of the time was spent in this awareness then? What was it like to live in this reality, to live from this place of oneness with sky and earth? Did fear make room for this space? Where do we find this space now?