Back to the Land
I hear Her call
A shift in me happened the night the buffalo came. A city girl, it was my first night alone in a tiny cabin in the Utah desert. I had arrived at the ranch in pitch blackness and had no sense of my surroundings. Now it was two in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. So out of my element, I was terrified beyond reason.
I asked for help. I’ve found that when I’m really desperate and pray, I’m answered. Because those prayers are actually sincere.
I heard a noise outside. I peeked out the window and not one but seven buffalo were peacefully grazing on my lawn. When I had checked in, one of the staff had casually mentioned that the onsite buffalo sometimes broke out of their corral in the middle of the night. Now here they were, surrounding my cabin, and my first glimpse was a closeup. The biggest of them was rubbing up against my window to get at the grass that grew just below.
It was thrilling and jolted me out of fear and into the miraculous present. After watching the buffalo for a while, I got back into bed and immediately fell asleep feeling protected by these majestic creatures.
The Old West had always captured my imagination. I took my avid reading of Little House on the Prairie to a new level and dressed up “old-fashioned” as a girl. I even threw a pioneer-themed birthday party. I also wasn’t ignorant of the frontier’s darkness. California kids learned about the Donner Party in grade school, and I could tell you the names of the tribes that had inhabited the stolen land where I grew up. But whatever spirit the West has, it’s in me.
The next morning, the ranch was bright and beautiful. The buffalo were back in their corral grazing on dried, golden grass. I sat on my porch swing enjoying a cup of coffee and my view of the distant mesas. The staff member who’d foreshadowed the buffalo visitation pulled up in a pickup and a cowboy hat. He asked if I wanted to go feed the chickens. I jumped at the opportunity and up into the truck’s cab, which was littered with tools and immediately brought me back to sitting on the sun-warmed seat of my dad’s Chevy pickup. As a girl, I had loved accompanying him on his weekend trips to the lumberyard or the dump.
Maybe simple times and pleasures weren’t just a thing of the past.
The chicken coop was about the size of my one-room cabin and inside it was warm, hushed and smelled like animal. I crouched in front of little cubbies to collect eggs, gingerly picking them up and marveling at how warm they were in the palm of my hand. There was a field mouse in the grain bin and once rescued (not by me), the ranch hand showed me how to feed the grain to the crowding chickens and roosters. A white sheepdog, with the face of a polar bear, lazed in the shade of the truck. Even though this was far from my life, this felt like my actual life.
When I came back, I was changed. There was a contentious presidential election a few days later and yet I had found out there, on the land, I could chat with people from “the other side.” It became clear to me that the divide wasn’t everything and maybe not even a real thing. Life was still happening. The night of my arrival on the ranch was also the birth of eleven Great Pyrenees puppies. I got to hold a not-yet-day-old puppy and it squiggled, squeaked and tried to burrow in the sherpa lining of my coat. As I held new life to my chest, my heart unclenched and softened.
Life is happening out there beyond the reach of our screens.
Inner change can be reflected in outer, superficial ways. I started wearing prairie dresses. I watched the show 1883, riveted, and then the whole series again. I started to follow Instagram influencers who raised babies and chickens, drank raw milk and advocated for slow living. I’d long been doing things like grounding (walking barefoot on the earth), eating pasture-raised eggs and drinking mineral-rich bottled spring water for my health.
At the ranch, the drinkable tap water was from a local spring and the eggs they served weren’t from Whole Foods. What if I lived somewhere where it didn’t take so much effort to get back to homeostasis (listening to birds-chirping ASMR videos on YouTube, wearing blue-light blocking glasses nightly and operating an arsenal of noise-cancelling technology daily)? What if it were just a fact of life?
The call back to the land, for me, is the call of the feminine. The world of masculine hustle culture and push and putting people into boxes is no longer for me. There is nothing wrong with my desire to be barefoot and pregnant and feel the tickle of tiny yellow flowers between my toes.
One afternoon, recently, a loud whisper in my ear woke me from a nap. It was a single but insistent word: Her.
She is calling me and maybe this story itself is the initial answer to the call. And now the way can reveal itself to me. Maybe a whole new life—dare I say, a new world—begins with a daydream.
