An underground forest

I'm sorry for the absence of regular posts. The job hunt has taken most of my time and zapped my creativity. It's been an interesting, enlightening and at times, treacherous search. I'll write more about it later. Today I was reminded of something else I wanted to write about.

Something that I am very keen on is perspective. Nothing is more fascinating to me than the powerful and intensely personal idea of perspective. No one sees any one thing the same way. There are very few absolutes in this world. Einstein theorized that we don't even experience time the same way. I love anything that makes me experience this shift in perspective. An article, a book, a movie, a photograph, a trip, a relationship - all of these things have at one time profoundly revealed a new way of experiencing my reality.

There was an article in National Geographic a few months ago about the prairie in the Flint Hills of Kansas. A pull quote reads "See the tallgrass prairie for itself, and you begin to suspect that grasses are what hold this world together." I love how the quote doesn't read "see the prairie for yourself" it says "itself." The vastness of plains belies the hidden complexity of this vital ecosystem. It reminded me of the Planet Earth episode on The Great Plains.

"The plains of our planet support the greatest gatherings of wildlife on earth," says David Attenborough in his delicious accent. "At the heart of all that happens here is a single living thing, grass. This miraculous plant covers a quarter of all the lands of the earth...and feeds more wildlife than any other plant."

The article starts with looking over the plain, what do you see? The answer might be nothing. The reason that grass is almost impossible to kill is because it lives under the ground with roots reaching up to eight feet below the soil. Grazing and fire are a natural part of the lifecycle of grasses, clearing away debris and allowing more light to warm the soil, fueling growth. While our instinct is to look out over a plain, to actually see the plain, you have to look down.

"Imagine the prairie upside down - the leaves and stems growing downward into the soil and the roots of all these species growing skyward. You are suddenly walking through a dense, tenacious thicket of roots. The horizon is gone because you are over-ears in plant fibers, some spreading and slender, some tall, with strange bulbous growths on them. It is as though you were walking through a forest of veins and capillaries, each species finding a different niche - a different height, a different strategy - in the competition for resources."

"The tallgrass prairie also reminds us how we should think about the life that surrounds us. Our old habits of seeing find in all of this a familiar simplicity, the kind you push past on your way to a more human future. But in the ancient prairie...there is a new way of seeing waiting to be found."