"There are several ways not to walk in the prairie, and one of them is with your eye on a far goal, because you then begin to believe you're not closing the distance any more than you would with a mirage. My woodland sense of scale and time didn't fit this country, and I started wondering whether I could reach the summit before dark On the prairie, distance and the miles of air turn movement to stasis and openness to a wall, an thing as difficult to penetrate as dense forest. I was hiking in a chamber of absences where the hear was the same as the far, and it seemed every time I raised a stop the earth rotated under me so that my foot fell just where it had lifted from. Limits and markers make travel possible for people: circumscribe our lines of sight and we can really get somewhere. Before my lay the Kansas of popular conception from Coronado on - that place you have to get through, that purgatory of mileage.
But I kept walking, and, when I dripped into hollows and the mound disappeared, I focused on a rock or a tuft of grass to keep from convoluting my track. Hiking in woods allows a traveler to imagine comforting enclosures, one leading to the next, and the walker can possess those little encompassed spaces, but the prairie and plains permit no such possession. Whatever else prairie is - grass, sky, wind - it is most of all a paradigm of infinity, a clearing full of many things except boundaries, and it's power comes from it's apparent limitlessness; there is no such thing as a small prairie any more than there is a little ocean, and the consequence of both is this challenge: try to take yourself seriously out here, you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon."


'Born in 1939, William Least Heat Moon claims a heritage that is both English-Irish and Osage. His first book, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, was a best-selling narrative of his travels on the back-roads of America. This selection comes from PrairyErth, set in the Flint Hills of central Kansas. The prairie encountered here is one of the last large tall grass prairies remaining in America.'

from "Of Earth and Sky" Spiritual Lessons from Nature", compiled by Thomas Becknell"

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