The moon was rising like a colossal butter pat melting over the edge of the flat earth stretched out endlessly in all directions. I had never in my life seen this much space before, and it was dizzying; cicadas were buzzing in synchronous throbs and the sun was slanting in backlit oranges and blues over the screaming green cornfields.
The landscape suddenly had a weird and profound impact on me. I was forced, in an almost physical sense, to surrender to it. I suddenly felt aware that I’d given myself a kind of slow-drip, accumulative heavy metal poisoning by pulling too much of my energy from shiny black pants and concrete skyscrapers. The land suddenly rolled up a steel garage door in my soul and threw a beauty bomb into me. It was like an inward-moving tsunami that smashed noiselessly through my skin and owned me in such a way that I felt the shimmering green of the cornfields inside my chest. It was weird and transformative; Iowa was cheerfully absorbing my neurotic urban toxins and giving me a spontaneous color transfusion. It was so generous—this earth, this ravishing abundance of beauty, feeding us, embracing us—that it made me cry like a child.
The enormity of this weird revelation really brought home for me the pointlessness of all the vanities and vexations that take on such ridiculous importance in an urban life. I starting seeing all my sufferings as symptomatic of the sin of forgetting, or never knowing, what it is like to have every part of your vision filled with a wild expanse of growing, green life—and how rhapsodic it feels to be inextricably connected to all that lives and breathes in nature.
They say a tree grows in Brooklyn. After visiting Iowa, I am determined to find it.
Cintra Wilson, Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style
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