My Mindscape

In returning to a place we’ve left, there is always the startling realization that it has changed in our absence. Somehow we never expect it to. Whenever I let my mind wander, it always returns to the same place. The place doesn’t always look the same to me, but even as much as the scenery varies, the place feels unchanged; even as much as its alteration in my absence startles me, the place feels undisturbed. Although the landscape, despite constant transformations, remains dissimilar from any place I have ever lived, it always feels like home. There is nothing here that I didn’t make or come here to see and this is why it always feels like home: the place is made of me.

I stand on prairie ground and in some places the grass grows long and golden. A pine forest begins off to my right at a distance I could cover quickly at a run but it might be miles. I can’t tell how far it is because visibility through my mindscape is unlimited. Ahead, a Yosemite stone looms bold like El Capitan. Across the plain of my mind, it lies distant enough to appear always unreachable. It might rain soon because the ground is growing too dry, but still a gentle stream moves like a shadow behind me. It sounds like dead water but when I turn to look at it, I make it move only because stagnant water isn’t clean. So it moves and sparkles in the rising morning-midday-afternoon setting sun and this place must be Wyoming but I don’t know it that way. I know this place by a feeling. I know it the way you know about something you’ve never doubted – like something untouchably tangible. You can understand everything about it when there is no one else to prove you wrong. Like the distance to the pines and their blue-grey-green needles and the drying sap and the crunch of pinecones. I take care of this country with my mind: it always seems to rain when the ground grows too dry, and I make the water move when it grows still. I build a cabin by the woods with a porch that faces east where the sun is always rising, and I plant an easy-to-climb sycamore behind the cabin looking west where the sun is always setting.

I suppose the next important question would be what I came for and what this place does for me. But I couldn’t be bothered with that—maybe I’m not ready to know. Maybe I’m just content here (now somewhere like Montana, now like Switzerland). I have a different set of questions about this place. I want to open it like an onion. I want to peel back the layers of detail, discovering microcosm upon microcosm, to see how much I can know about this place. Then I stand so still, not moving or breathing, as this landscape reveals itself to me. I see the irregularity at the tips of the fallen pine needles and the jagged chips of stone bound up in nuggets of dirt. I feel the freedom of the wide, open spaces, and I sense the way a big sky makes me feel not insignificant but rather less claustrophobic. In this discovering, I learn as much about myself and my needs as I do about this place. So in effect, in unpacking my surroundings, I come to understand what I didn’t think I was ready to know.

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