It’s a huge theatre in the round, my path taking me originally toward and then around it. I’d planned to stop and look at a ghost town, but it remained behind the waving torn curtain of the storm in the distance. I turned the radio off to better hear the performance, an ancient one that has been going on long before anyone’s arrival here. The road adds a squared off set of vantage points that seem sort of artificial, I know the storm is indifferent to me as its audience.

I see lightning strike the ground a few places around me, in my hair a flash of static, adding to the feeling of being close. The resultant almost instantaneous thunder is palpable; a hypnagogic-like sense of state now, I’m one with it as time suspends, a protracted moment of cosmic teleogenetic forces that started billions of years ago riding ever onward. I feel painted into the impressionistic colors of the rain filled sky and golden fields of barley as a gray barn rises on the horizon signaling storms end as I approach and pass on by.

As time now resumes and passes, I think now how some look at the prairie and see nothing. Today I see a place of expanse where the mind and spirit take rest, with renewal at every vista.