Edge of the Earth

When I was a kid, growing up on the prairie, I wanted to drive to the edge of the earth and look over.
On the sunswept prairie the sky curves down to touch the earth.
I wondered how high a ladder you would need to touch the dome of blue with your hand.
My curly head could barely see over the dash of our Galaxy 500.
But over the dash was the gravel road that reached out to the edge of sight and bumped up against the blue wall of sky.
Yes, the sky went not only up, but out . . . and around.

When I became an adult I had assumed that every kid would have thought the same thing until they, like I, were politely told by some grown-up who knew better that there was no edge and that the earth was round and that the sky was not a lid on the land.

Not having a lid on the land became unsettling considering the world was not flat. How would we stay on and inside?

Too soon for me to learn about gravity.
Any wonder it did not work when I pointed my elbows in a wing shape and flapped as I jumped off the picnic table.
Birds did it. So that whole gravity story did not work for me.
Lot of this did not make sense. I knew I was getting snowed. Kids don’t get told the truth. (Proof? Boogyman. Toothfairy. Santa Claus.)

But in college I met friends who grew up in the mountains and laughed at my childhood memories of the edge of the earth.
Is it a truth only we prairie kids have to unlearn?

City adults who spent their childhood in cement, symmetrical neighbourhoods don’t get it either.

What a shame not to get out where you can see forever.
Horizons, or rather lack of them give you a sense of the eternal, something that fills the openness with more openness.

All that quickly erodes inside buildings, boxes, gridlock and deadlines.

We don’t belong in there.
We belong on the edge of forever, looking out.
Soaring . . .


The prairie has a palpable continuance, where there is no end and you are a part of it all. You don’t actually know in your mind but you feel it on your skin.
This is not new and it is not enlightened, it is simply like breathing air.
Sky, earth, we.