Badlands Musings

The following entries were written as my family and I drove west to visit my father and grandfather this summer. While our ultimate destination was mountainous Idaho, these musings are on what turned out to be my favorite terrain of the trip--the Badlands of North Dakota.



7-1-2013North Dakota rolls by revealing the surprise of hills and fields, blue skies and green grass.I didn't expect this. As a child and teenager, I despised the landscape of most prairie states, even the farming states closer to home, like Southern Illinois. Perhaps it is changed, I thought. Or perhaps it is me who has changed, not the landscape.

This consideration is confirmed in the complaints voiced by my own children--"nothing to look at, nothing to do" even while I try to memorize every mile that flies by. every rock pile dotted soybean field. every roaming heard of cattle. every duck delights as do the gulls and geese. cranes, and yes, even pelicans. The yellow, white and red grasses merge into bright green reeds in marshy waysides. Reservoirs overwhelm fence posts. And as you search the distant horizon, your chest expands to inhale this wide world. Here I can breathe. I can think. I can watch and examine. Well, as much as one can while speeding by at 75 mph.

7-2-2013

Just when I think I can't absorb anymore beauty, we pass another dream of scenery. North Dakota wild horses, wild hills, glorious wildflowers, white-clouded studded blue skies. I expand, the cavity in my soul filling up. I am full. I cry in amazement. And I rest as we enter Montana. I am full, I think. No more gasping in awe today. Then halfway through the state, after forests suddenly appeared on the sage hills, the mountains blaze across the horizon. Peaks and snow. shadows and light. The clouds around them seem separate from the skies above us, still in the plains. And tears well up again. I am overflowing. all this. all this is His doing. His. He is too great for me. It is a splendid overwhelming.

Every time you feel in God's creatures something pleasing and attractive, do not let your attention be arrested by them alone, but, passing them by, transfer your thoughts to God and say: O my God, if Thy creations are so full of beauty, delight and joy, how infinitely more full of beauty, delight and joy are Thou Thyself, creator of all! --Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain