A Diverse Prairie is a Healthy Prairie

A prompt for you this week.

In Praise of Art-in-Place

Growing up, weekends with my dad often revolved around making art in public. We would throw guitars, sketchbooks, pens and paints and pencils, the Nikon and a few rolls of film into his ‘57 Chevy Apache and cruise into town with the windows down. Drawing in coffee shops, singing in the park, kneeling down in alleys to capture the light on a beautiful weed made every moment a happening. Creating in public not only invites conversation & connection but it enchants the world around you.

When I left for college I took a Greyhound bus from Medford, Oregon to Manhattan and my dad (brave soul) traveled with me. So naturally we brought our sketchbooks with us.

“Charming Iowa” a sketchbook page from my cross country journey in August of 2000

I was on a great adventure from the cattle fields of my youth to my new life in the big city & documenting every moment in real time. Having recently ‘come out’, I write on these pages about missing my high school girlfriend, of course, and about the men three seats back with swastika tattoos snickering and leering at me from Reno to Chicago. I’m writing about how tremblingly vast the sky is in Wyoming and how conspicuous and vulnerable I feel out there on the edge of my known universe— the edge of adulthood.

There’s a lot of pain and poetry on those pages but because they were captured in-place, they are now transporters to an incredibly specific moment in time that is irreproducible and therefore utterly sacred.

23 years later holding this book in my hands, I remember exactly how it felt to reach the rolling cornfields of Iowa after days in the desert. I can feel myself balancing my notebook on my lap and gazing out the window trying capture the idea of the moment— the gesture of the rolling green hills dotted with oak trees and grain silos. “Charming” was the only language I had for it, but it seemed to me to define the very essence of the word.

Folding Time: Though 18 year old me finds this extremely unlikely, I’m writing to you now from the home studio I share with my husband in central Iowa.

Funny, isn’t it, the way things come around?

This Friday my piece for Des Moines’ public piano project titled “A Diverse Prairie is a Healthy Prairie” will be revealed then rolled out on to the city streets to be enjoyed by all until the fall. If you find yourself here, I hope you will enchant the moment by sitting down and playing your own unique song— whatever it sounds like in that very moment, in that very place— up into this big blue sky.

You see…

Living here now, I can tell you that the vast and rolling monoculture fields of Iowa are undeniably charming from the window of a moving vehicle, but the real poetry is in the 0.1% of remaining native prairie land. By peak summer, their staggeringly diverse compositions of grasses and flowers and trees and bugs and birds and butterflies send an almost deafening cacophony of sound & smell up into an endless sky. And within the exquisite texture of this landscape, unique sub-systems emerge. Microecologies form amongst co-mingling flora and fauna, each adapting uniquely to one another and their hyper-specific location on the land. They join together to create a completely unique & vital chorus. Within this diversity is poetic nuance formed by togetherness and place.

Of course this is also all a metaphor.

Ecologists and preservationists are all quite clear on what makes a thriving ecosystem: Diversity means nutrient dense soil, diversity means clear water, diversity means resilience, diversity means success for the whole web of life.

“A Diverse Prairie is a Healthy Prairie” 2023, for Citysounds public piano project (& it’s blacklight reactive!)

A Prompt for You:

Create something in public today. While you’re there, capture everything about your internal and external landscape in that specific place & moment. Then consider these questions: Where in the prairies of your life do you sense a creeping monoculture?Who and what makes up your own thriving, resilient ecosystem? And what will you do today to protect sacred diversity?