“It was at this moment that I fell in love with space, endless space.”  Esther Hautzig, The Endless Steppe

It was in North Dakota that I first encountered the prairie landscape. From my journal at the time:

The first thing I noticed about the prairie is the sky. There is so much sky that there isn’t enough pigment for it; even when there isn’t a cloud above, the sky is a weak, diluted blue. The next thing I noticed was the flatness that meant there was more land and sky than I could take in with one gaze, that there was no place to rest the eyes. It took my breath away. In North Dakota, the prairie is marigold, emerald, and amber.

I had thought myself an ocean and even a mountain girl and was surprised to find myself moved to tears by a landscape of endless sky and dancing grass as high as my waist. It is only in hindsight that I can recognize how this discovery shaped the years that followed. I can add North Dakota to the list of places that shook me out of my complacency and made me look at the world, and my life, in a different way, and then set me on a different course.

Sitting here in North Dakota once more, I am shocked to realise that it is here that my journey to full-timing truly began. It is here that the first stirrings came into my mind that my life could be different, that there were other options for me, that there was more to life than what I knew. I barely spent any time in this state and it still had time to sear itself into my consciousness. It has been almost seven years since I was first here, but it feels like another life. Perhaps it was.