beautiful desolation

I lived in Nebraska my first eighteen years. At the time, with the misguided mind of my youth, I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have.

I was so focused on getting out. I was too young to know that I needed to appreciate the moments I had. Now, my visits home are so few and far between that it breaks my heart. I look back to that time in my life with a certain sense of nostalgia.

When I tell people about my motherland I always describe it as both beautiful and desolate. Part of the beauty is the desolation. The wide open empty spaces. The haunting wind that whistles on the prairie. It lives immortal in the words of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather.

We are all works of art, works of beautiful desolation. Beautiful emptiness. We are containers. We fill ourselves up with what we choose. Once we leave home, we have a choice. We can no longer blame our parents for our problems. We are our problem. And we have control.

It took me some time to get over the things I went through in my childhood. Time truly is a healer of many wounds. Seen and unseen. As we grow and mature, we have a choice to let our experiences define us, or we can learn and grow stronger from them.

Now I have a little more wisdom. I realize I wouldn't be the person I am today, if I had not I walked through all of the valleys and the shadows of my childhood and adolescence. And I like who I am. :-)

Sometimes, life doesn't make sense, until you look back, and you see the paths that led you here, and you realize it all made sense, you just didn't know it.

"Abandoned House, Haskell County Kansas"

By Irving Rusinow, April 1941

National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics