Here at the Tallgrass Artist Residency, it’s about time, about making time.
I have time to settle into a new time frame-ten days living on this endangered landscape of deeply rooted prairie and the wisdoms and histories that it holds.
I arrive here mid-May, the most excellent and benevolent time the prairie has to offer, and the deep welcoming feeling of the prairie is palpable and immediate upon arrival.
This landscape is an epic poem always being written, always carrying the stories from before, from the time when it emerged from what was once the shale floor of a shallow sea. The prairie floor is downy with penstemon, butterfly weed, prairie rose, and wild indigo. There are horses that whinny and gallop in formation up the hill to the horizon.
I read some poetry in the rocking chair out front and listen to the prairie’s symphony of biodiversity-the buzzes and whirs of countless birds and insects, the brush and rustle of the grasses, and the gentle breeze that claps the curtains like an intermittent metronome.
I rock back and forth and a deep exhale lets me know that I am welcomed and settled.
Just twenty steps from my back door lie two train tracks that cut through the tallgrass prairie landscape. And then I hear it for the first time, a great thunder that magnifies and swells. It is too sunny for it to be a tornado and I run out back to see the train approaching.
The vociferous approach of the nearly incessant trains that slice through the pastoral landscape and the scrape of rails is a reminder of the broken ground plowed asunder in this natural native beauty to extract, exterminate, exploit, and transport. It’s a reminder of digging in, of laying claim, of the audacity to pass over the landscape it destroyed which it reinforces and reminds with each scrape and flashing light.
Even still, I greet the train and wave as if it is a parade. Its movement blocks the view of the prairie that sits just beyond the tracks. I catch mere glimpses of it in stop motion staccato between the chain of cars before it finally passes and once again exposes fullness of the deep and wide horizon.
The train is an alarm clock set at varying hours, always interrupting, time and time again. Like me, the train is a time traveler, chasing time as much as it is making up time. It’s not only my impulse but also human nature to capture time, to put a saddle on it, to tame it, to outrace it. I understand it as much as I am startled by it.
I’m a writer, director, and filmmaker. My work is often time-based--capturing moments in photograph and video, in journal, and performance on the fleeting temporal stage.
I’ve come here to focus on my film, Xylem, a poem-based experimental film about identity and legacy positioning tree as record-keeper, narrator, and time machine.
Out here on the prairie, trees are loners, often found alone or at the margins, near fence lines, guarding rivers. Like me, trees are writers… record-keepers, and time machines. Their bark is paper and time, the ink.
Like the time marked by xylem, as written in the ring of trees, I am reminded that time is a circle and that is what I leave behind and the reason why I always return.
Just days before I came to the residency, on the night when the aurora borealis seeped as low as Kansas, I totaled my car in an early morning collision with a deer. In a wild and unexpected circumstance, my insurance offered me a rental sedan like the one I wrecked and was instead given an Audi A5, the sleekest, fastest, and most luxurious of any car I’ve ever driven.
I chased a train the night of the Flower Moon driving way too fast in a car that held too much horsepower. I galloped ahead of the train eating up lines in the road in the last quickening moments of the sunset, in the closing loop of the day, hitting 125 mph on the scenic byway before making it back to cross the train tracks and hike to the top of the hill to watch our daily sunset appear in its devout glory.
I take a breath and release myself to the sun’s too quick descent as the train comes hollering around the bend in the yonder, horns blaring-watching time pass, and I slow down enough to watch time circle and honor its spiral. Out here on the prairie, time is at the turn of the seasons, the parade of wildflowers, the sun’s rising and setting, in animal migrations, in the motion of the waters, in growing cycles, and constellations.
Standing in the open grasslands, I stare into the dutiful and setting sun, in its goldenpurple hue and I realize that I have lost track of time, as well as the urge to control it. For at least this daily moment, I move with time as it moves-in a circle rather than by the boxes and straight-edge lines of calendars, by the lines of transport and commerce that try to corral the wild horse that is time.
Here in the infinitude of this deep time and vast place, I look across the distance to the horizon and I am reminded of my ultimate insignificance and that makes me feel timeless.
