As a boy I swam through a sea of endless summer, through dew-sodden dawns and dust-drenched afternoons towards that which, should I have ever grasped it, would have vanished at my touch.

In the mornings a lone heron would eye me from the mists that formed on the little stream separating our fields from the rest of the world, a stream that mirrored the Milky Way, the ancient pathway between this world and the next.  Dust raised by feet that had once waded this stream still lingers in the midnight sky, marking the journeys of those who came before us across — and finally beyond — this land.

But there were winters too, winters possessed of a stillness beyond comprehension.  Simply to breathe was to shatter the air; the vapor of one’s breath an affront to the dignity of the cold.  It was a cold that ate into one’s feet, singed one’s cheeks; the cold of Death.  But a reminder too that life arises from Death, from stillness too deep for Nature to endure…

Our lives are marked by the seasons of the Plains, seasons that slowly etch themselves into the faces of those who have worked hard and lived well.

Such a face graced Maude, an old Pawnee woman who late in her life came to visit this, her ancestral home.  I remember her talking of her grandparents, the last of her people to have lived on this land.  They too had navigated the shimmering waves an ochre sun still draws forth from this boundless sea of green.  Grown from this soil, Maude’s ancestors were no more able to break free of this land’s spell than the willow from the stream bank.  In her heart she carried the echoes of her people’s dreams, dreams that glistened like moonlight on fresh-fallen snow, echoes fading slowly like the call of a crane into a poignant, upwelling forever.

Though often harsh and uncaring, there is a poetic quality to this land.  Yet in a world where we’ve come to believe every ounce of strength, every millisecond of attention, must be focused on outrunning the rats, there is little place for painting this wind-swept mélange of stark and subtle textures with words and song.

Which is a shame; poetry lies at the root of life’s narrative and is essential to weaving people with context.  Poetry expresses what it means to be human, giving voice to our timeless search for meaning in the convoluted interplay of inner and outer worlds.  The Pawnee captured what it means to be part of this land in song, as long ago even we Westerners had a habit of doing before gradually capitulating to the bureaucratic utility of prose, a more precise if less-encompassing means of accounting for the sundry minutia of life.

Dreams still speak in this archetypal language of the past; not through rhyme, but in the varied and symbolic meanings rhyme once conveyed.  Dreams remind us we are not merely farmers, retailers and accountants but deep and complex beings, ephemeral yet firmly rooted in the fecund loam beneath our feet, nourished by ancient and numinous streams.

I told Maude once of watching ripples on the Beaver Creek dance with the sunlight filtering through cottonwood leaves.  I told her of how this place had — for reasons beyond my understanding — taken the trouble to teach me that to endure we, like all those before us, must become “children of this land.”

Her grandparents had approached our ancestors without guile, without malice.  They would welcome us if only we would allow them to stay.  By and large we would not.

We wrested it from them one homestead at a time, draining away their strength in a long battle of attrition.

And now it is our land, claimed with sweat and grief, sacrifice and determination.

But do we understand that by taking this land it is now our responsibility to protect it, to hold it as dear as every people before us has?  Do we understand that the color of one’s skin doesn’t matter – that in displacing the Native Americans we have taken on an ancient obligation to forever care for both this land and the communities we build upon it?

We stand today as the new Natives, modern “children of this land.”  In spreading across it we have implicitly agreed to cherish it every bit as much as those before us have, letting go only when the last of our kind finally vanishes into the shimmering tides of endless tomorrows…