A recent trip to Fargo for my every-few-weeks live baseball fix also included a trip into downtown to pick up some art pieces for Lisa’s store, where I took a short trek through part of downtown.  While doing this, I was practicing some mindfulness exercises (‘think of each step on the earth”) and although I’d noticed the Bison sculptures on the sidewalks before throughout, “Heartbeat of the Red River Valley” painted by Pat Kruger crossed my vision after scanning the railroad tracks for oncoming trains on Broadway crossing toward Main Avenue.

The body of the beast shows expansive scenes of the plains and the mountains, once the province of Tatanka, but the singular tear falling from the left eye clearly represents sadness and loss and was absolutely fixating.

A couple of days later while driving on State Highway 200 in central North Dakota, the smooth rolling hills shaping my awareness, bringing  the image of this sculpture back to me.   I thought of thousands of bison across the land where I so easily now drove this gray ribbon of road and was filled with waves of sadness.   Stopping my pickup, I got out, feeling the fading sun and the smooth breeze on my face. Recalling my studies in college of Jung’s archetypal Collective Unconscious, I wondered if the Bison too have an unspoken communal memory of times past, so brilliantly depicted on the painted sculpture now locked back in its urban home. I felt an unexpected connection to the land and the sky, realizing at that moment that’s what art does- finds and connects our experiences, both known and unknown.

I’ll be looking forward to seeing him again in his urban garden, feeling and sharing the ancient memory of the grass covered prairie, being once again mindful of the richness of our collective experience.