ARTWORK + > Writing

An Open Book of Grass

i. The prairie is (not) a forest.

I—like you, I suspect—love forests. I love forests for their cool slanting green light and the way the trees enclose you. I love forests because to be surrounded in three dimensions by living, breathing beings is beauty. I love forests, but what I want to talk to you about are prairies. Because this is not a place of forests. What we have here (in the Midwest, where I write to you from)—what we had here, long to have here—what we miss, is tallgrass prairies. Now rolled under the plow.

Wikipedia, our modern oracle—no longer a voice whispering through the smoke of laurel and oleander—speaks of them mostly in the past tense. She says: “very little tallgrass prairie remains.”

From the height of human eyes, the prairie is not a forest; it seems, in fact, the very opposite. Rolling and flat, its only measure the horizon. Its openness, its mild, plain face turned to the world. In all this open space, we have been taught to see waste. We call it ‘just grass,’ waiting to become something useful. Oriented, as we are, to see greatness only when it towers above, we miss the tallness of tallgrass prairies.

In forests, we know how to see the sacred. The columns of trees. The slanting cathedral light. But can we not feel awe too—in the light and the wind?

It is only when we cease to privilege size, no longer preferring our own human scale, our verticality, that we see that forest (like many things) can be a relative term. Were we to be a Karner Blue Butterfly1 we would innately know the horizontal forest-ness of the prairie, grasses towering overhead, enfolding us. Each strata inhabited by perfectly adapted beings. The networks of roots underfoot. The detail and complexity of this woven ecosystem. And though we are thousands of times larger than much of the biota of this tiny forest, it does us well to remember the worlds that exist under our feet; these small lives supporting our small lives.

In this place, where I write to you from, the prairie was once a vast cloth of grasses and forbs. It held us together, this network of roots. It nourished us.

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections†


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1. The Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis) is a tiny metallic-blue butterfly, now vanishingly rare, as our thigh-skimming grasses once dotted with Lupine2 have been turned to elephant’s-eye-high GMO corn, have been plowed under for endless feedlot-destined soy—have begun to make us feel another kind of small.

2. Lupine (Lupinus perennis) is the only food-plant of the Karner Blue. A beautiful blue-blooming plant in the legume family, Lupine’s seeds were once used extensively by native peoples as a nutritious food crop—now targeted as a weed by Big Agro. Its name lupinus, meaning of the wolf, was given by European settlers who misunderstood both the flowers and wolves to be thieves. Also known as Quaker 4 Bonnets, Lupine, far from being a thief, is in fact generous—its symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria enriching the soil for plants and humans alike.

3. Gray Wolves (Canis lupus) don’t live only in forests. They too can thrive, used to thrive—like you could (you would, my dear)—in the rich wind-rolled folds of the prairie—blushing with ripe seed heads, filled with the song of grouse. Bison and antelopes moved to the pace of the wolves—aerating soil with their fleet hooves, cropping the grasses in rhythmic seasonal circles. But oh, the wolves themselves, they have had it far worse than the flower to which they are namesake. You already know.



ii. a plain(s) poem

This framed poem has hung on the wall of my grandparents’ home since I was a child. As secular humanists, they read this poem as I would like you to read this poem.

It is green grass and leaf that learned the miracle of turning starlight into life—thereby allowing all others to live. So forget god—and think instead of plants.


We broke today on the homestead
The last of the virgin sod,
And a haunting feeling oppressed me
That we marred a work of God.

A fragrance rose from the furrow,
A fragrance both young and old.
It was fresh with the dew of the morning,
Yet aged with time untold.

The creak of leather and clevis,
The rip of the coulter blade,
And we wreck what God with the labor
Of countless years has made.

I thought, while laying the last land,
Of the tropical sun and rains,
Of the jungles, oceans, and glaciers
Which had helped to make these plains;

Of monsters, horrid and fearful,
Which reigned in the land we plow,
And it seemed to me so presumptuous
Of man to claim it now.

So when, today, on the homestead,
We finished the virgin sod,
Is it strange I almost regretted
To have marred that work of God? ✢


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4. Quakers began to settle the Great Plains area starting in the 1850’s. They believed in dignity of all peoples and equality of the sexes, and built their homes of sod5—living (as we all would do well to remember we do) by the grace of the earth, and close to her.

5. A sod wall is different from other walls. Constructed from the prairie itself, in this way people lived both on, but also enclosed by the land. Enclosed by walls which were the landscape—rather than a way of shutting the landscape out. So, a sod house is different than other houses. Most other houses aim to create a human-place where nature is not: a not-nature-place. So, a sod home is different than other homes. The builders of those other homes forgot that no matter how they made their walls, their own animal-presence would makes their homes a nature-place. (They forgot to remember—not yet having learned that within us lie multitudes, that we too are ecosystems.) So, a sod wall is different from other walls. Sod is earth: layered with roots, shoots, rhizomes and blooms. Living in a sod house is living inside the prairie. No longer on the skin of the Earth, but within. Tucked. When we lived in homes of sod, at night the prairie-earth would seep into us, gentling our dreams, making us long for the sweetness of young grass on our lips—waking children in the night with these passions, to forage under the butter moon.



iii. sweetgrass dreams

The prairie wants to seduce you. Lull you, rock you to sleep on amber waves. Put your head down here, down among the roots of the Buffalo6 Grass (Buchloe dactyloides), and dream for a while.

My tongue, every atom of my blood,
form'd from this soil, this air†


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6. Buffalo. You knew we must talk of Buffalo. Though their ‘real’ name is American Bison (Bison bison), and they are only distantly related to true Buffalo—buf-fa-lo, the sounding of hot breath huffed from heavy heads, is their onomatopoetic fame. By the 1800s, their 50 million were reduced to hundreds. But, Buffalo: You can see them now. You knew their forms on the prairies and plains behind closed eyes, rusted dust erupting from cloven hooves, wooly brown backs humped, a sea of dark curls, an impenetrable world—And their sound! You shot them from trains, saw them falling in the millions; each one took an hour to fall in black and white. We piled their skulls one thousand high. They made us feel something. Their deaths made us feel alive. Fuck us. Fuck that. We knew what we were doing, as we went deaf from the shots6.

7. General Sheridan, on the killers of Buffalo: “These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. And it is a well known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle.”


iv. a common land

You must look at the prairie if you wish to look at plants, to think deeply about plants, to deepen the roots of your thinking on plants. If you keen your sight here—in this plain(s) land where the untrained eye slides off—it will serve you well anywhere. This is an ecosystem defined not by the grandness of rivers, lakes, mountains or shores—but by a tapestry of small plants. If you are not near a prairie, perhaps there is a museum nearby where you can study medieval weavings, thousand hour tatted lace, painstaking embroideries. This will begin your work well.

Once a great and common place, intact prairies are now vanishingly rare.

And here language could fail us, if we fail to read its roots. Let me help you trace them, teasing their strands from the darkened earth.

We once saw these prairies and thought common: as in our prairie-land is so common, it never could be exhausted. And as we continued to forget to continue to see, common began also to mean: not worth examining, uninteresting. Taken for granted. Which soon became: we’ll take this. No longer dreaming of light and wind, we took this once common land, making new dreams of capital.

But I want you to know the common-ness of our prairies in another way. I say common meaning something we all had in common, meaning something we could all be a part of—still. I also say common meaning for us all, meaning these lands (all lands) should be held by people in common (by human-people, buffalo-people, wolf-people...).


For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.†


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vi. speaking without words

So, prairie plants, if you have learned to keen your senses, have much to say. They remind us to mind the small things. To not to privilege our size. Or even our perception of the pace of passing time. (Standing within this time of lost prairies, I long for a longer view of time.)

Our Wikipedia tells us that with their near miraculous ability to make food from sunlight, plants are at the base of most food chains on our planet. And here again we see a problem with human language, with the way we read this word: base.

We have learned to think base meaning lowly, at the bottom—even these words are unbalanced in their metaphoric content. We gloss base to mean unworthy, puny, small. We favor the vista of human stature, where we are somehow above, apart from the base. (We think to escape death in this way.) We avoid seeing the forest in the grass. We avoid seeing we are part of this smallness ourselves—that we are constituted wholly of this cloth, promised to rot and return to this microcosmic earth.

But I say base, as in foundation, base, as in we rest upon you—base, as in we all collapse without you, plants.


I guess it must be the flag of my disposition,
out of hopeful green stuff woven.†



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vii. very little

Illinois, where I live, is called ‘The Prairie State,’ yet less than 1% of our prairies remain. Our Wikipedia oracle tells us again: very little. We wear our hypocrisy here, in this place where most people have never seen a prairie. This should tell us something, that we have named our home for a place existing in-name-only. It should tell us something about a people who might be holding a space open, for this prairie openness to return.

So—were it possible—how might seeing the prairie as a Karner Blue challenge our habituated conceptions? These lands could open us. They could read to us, while we read them—telling of a role beyond ‘caretaker.’ A new relationship not based on stature: physical or metaphoric. A (re)cognition that it is this common base of overlooked others, who in fact care for us.

(So don’t exhaust yourself, my love, holding yourself up so high—just be instead of the world, down amongst the roots.)

What could it mean to welcome back into our sensuous world an understanding of the internal humming of these others, a respect for their own wishing to be. Can we attune ourselves to this vibration?

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.†



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viii. a prairie path

The prairie’s un-endingness has ended. And still the plow has not stopped. Oh, place of light and wind, golden green with soft rippling grasses, shaken with birds, humming with insects. Your sod walls are turned over. Your seeds lie dormant. A once seamless quilt of plants pulled up and over our world, the prairie now lies in scraps.

But despite these ends, there are new paths beginning—and most of these start when we take the time to truly look at plants. All over our former prairies & plains, new desires are taking root. People are choosing natives plants for their yards, and are making butterfly gardens. Many people, like myself, lead foraging walks, working to recover old plant-knowledge. In Chicago, our Park District is planting prairie swaths, and keeping them healthy with natural burns. Children are asking their parents to leave the milkweed in their yards un-pulled. And slowly, the Buffalo are returning.

This is an appeal to let the prairie seduce you. Let your dreams be of seeds stitched underfoot, quickening with life. Yearn for sweet grass. Be an advocate for weeds. Imagine, again, the prairie as forest, remaking the quilt of the world. Because in the Anthropocene Era, human imagination has become an ecological force—and so, care has become a radical act.

So, look out upon this future prairie, and build inside yourself a tiny house with walls of sod. The house is empty. What will arise from this emptiness?

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† Walt Whitman, excerpts of Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass, 1891-92
✢ R. G. Ruste, The Last of the Virgin Sod, 1912