Life on interior plains

If someone asked you where you find yourself in life, would you say, «On the land?»More than two centuries past the industrial revolution, with art, craft, and commerce offloaded to an electronic, digital ecosystem, we often live and labor without giving much thought to the literal, physical ground of our lives.The Interior Plains of North America embrace a vast amount of land which includes a range of landscapes and weathers that are anything but plain. Fields and grasslands at the Plains’ center give way to forests, mountains, lakes, and hills. Like the geological and geographic plains we live on, we carry an interior landscape within us, where planes of experience, consciousness and thought shape our lives. We share our human selves with the land at every moment, as the land shares itself with us.The land also puts us in our place—in both senses of the word. It’s the foundation of our lives, showing us where we belong and placing us in relation to the universe. It reminds us that we are minuscule and yet, like the land itself, we are each an entire being inextricably tied to the land: one to one, one on one, one by one. One with the land. The root of all answers to pressing questions on climate, sustainability, and our future is love for the land and the outer and inner lives it provides a foundation for.Accompanied by the meditative, black and white landscape photography of Jeff Damron, the poems in Life on interior plains, remind us that the land is a fellow sentient being, humanity’s bedrock, the foundation of our lives and loves, our selves and souls.