Blind, But Beginning to See

 We are drawn to the prairie.  Intellectually, we know it to be habitat for any number of species, and forage for a range of pollinators.  But there is more to our affection.  There is the graceful ballet of the tall grasses in the breeze; the complex diversity of its plant population.  There is the echo of Iowa’s past when most of this state was covered in this way.  There is the allure of its opaque mystique, veiling any real certainty of what might be hiding, sheltering within its reaches.  

 

And so it is that we found ourselves wanting more.  We feel no devotion toward conventional lawns, and our property supports more than it needs.  That, and there is a hillside we thought could use some “dressing up” with native flowers and bluestems.  The prairie contractor whose skills and knowledge we routinely leverage stopped by to review what we had in mind.  “This area gets too little sun,” he observed about one targeted area; “this section will take multiple rounds of attention,” he qualified about another.  “And this one…” he paused to wade into the foliage for a closer look, “…this one is filled with wild bergamot.  Your bees will love them.  And these wild legumes are good for the soil.  This is Illinois Tick Trefoil, and that's Canada black snakeroot, and there is goldenrod.  Even this variety of thistle is important, though the farmers don't like them in their fields."

Time and again he pointed out, and gave a name to, value.  "They are the same species you would be planting with the prairie mix.  You want them.  It doesn’t make much sense to clear them out only to reseed them.”  About still another he matter-of-factly asked, “haven’t you noticed it blossom?” – as if to wonder why we would destroy what so generously offers up its natural gifts.  For me, still lamentably stuck in the banal binary of “good” plants and “bad” plants, it was helpful to have these native stems reframed.

 

Blindness is the result of any number of conditions, I know, but ignorance is likely chief among them.  It isn’t, of course, blindness of the literal, physical kind - my corrective lenses compensate for any of those current deficiencies; simply the inability to actually see what you see.  Jesus, as I recall, warned against such a condition.

 

Ignorant, then, and thusly blind, I sheepishly thanked the contractor for his knowledge, his patient instruction, and his integrity.  He could have simply taken our money, after all, and done what we were asking him to do, never mind the idiocy of it. Instead, he invited us to actually inhabit the world that presently surrounds us; to see with more appreciative eyes; to eschew the fiction of what we wanted, in favor of wanting the beauty we already have.  That serving as such an environmental, horticultural “Sherpa” for us wouldn’t put money in his pocket didn’t seem to bother him.  The land, itself, is apparently more his employer than two aspirational farmsteaders. 

 

We smile now, passing along these trails; more appreciatively curious than aesthetically judgmental.  Even when we can’t identify what we are seeing – which is, yet, most of the time – we start with the assumption that this or that stem or petal is, for its own expression of life and beauty, worth noticing.

 

Even the thistle.  

 

And I wonder to what other and broader beauties my ignorance blinds.  Hues and shades.  Shapes and stories.  Wonders that my pre-conceived delusions about loveliness prevent me from seeing.