Education and Inspiration through the ancient art of storytelling!
Here I sit on a plane sailing 35,000 feet above the farm fields of the American Midwest. Swollen rivers surge over their banks, visible through the scattered white billowing clouds. The neat square and rectangular patches of early summer corn and young soybeans create a checker board of the broadest shades of green. There is fertility in a life lived rooted in this Midwestern soil. These are the worst floods in many years; it seems a crisis if you built too close to the river, but to the rest of us this represents alluvial till, a replenishing of the soil. At this elevation, the tiny farm houses, barns and grain elevators seem like insignificant specks, but there is a wealth stored in those bins, a wisdom sleeping in those Victorian framed houses with their antique beds passed down through the family. (I wonder, how many farmers sleep in the bed where they were conceived? I know, there are certainly more than those in the ranch style brick houses of their suburban counterparts!)
I am pleased by the number of creek beds that are tree-lined, the woodlots that have grown larger in the past few generations. Even the smallest towns have as many trees as houses, and the forest preserves that ring Chicago bring me pleasure as we descend towards touchdown.
I try to push it aside, but I cannot keep out this sad thought… how disheartened I am that there are no longer herds of buffalo and elk, or vast stretches of flowering prairies. Today, my birthday, I will hit the ground running, take a shuttle to my car, drive to the southern suburbs of Chicago and tell stories of the Pioneer past at a historic home to help celebrate their anniversary. My hope is that my stories will carry the audience through time to re-imagine the romantic idea of how things once were and maybe, just maybe, someone, besides me, will ask: what can I do to step towards, once again?
