Under Big Skies

I had forgotten how beautiful and open the skies in Illinois can be. I had grown too accustomed to light pollution and hills that seemed to leap from the soil at random. The northeast is gorgeous in its own way, famous for its mountains and dense forests, and it makes one marvel rather quickly at the wonder that is the north American continent. However, I had noticed myself longing for something wider. Something more expansive. A place where there was room to take deep breaths and not feel like you were stealing air, like Internet, from your unknown neighbors. As route 70 turned into route 57 on the southeastern side of Illinois, that place I had been longing for opened up in all of it's splendor. I had forgotten how large the clouds were, how blue a sky could be, and how the sun cast shadows in some places and put forth pockets of resplendence which painted the land like a checkerboard.

There are some images that bring forth imaginings and then explode them, tearing to shreds the fictitious with the luminosity of that which is. (This is why phenomenology is, for me, a remarkably christian endeavor.) Witnessing that sea of grass and corn and sky and cloud was such an explosion. It reminded me of when I pulled off of 70 for the first time and drove with my parents into Greenville. There is a feeling that can be described as a home that's been waiting for you--that's the feeling I had as the imagined return to the middle west fractured before the revelation of what I was actually seeing.

There is also a romance about the middle west which is not the whole truth. But what I talk about when I see the flatness and the enormity of the sky is not this romance. Spend just a little bit of time in Granite City or even in parts of Carbondale where I live, and you will see something very unromantic. Size and expanse make a distinct culture something difficult to see. It doesn't help that the culture of the middle west has been caricatured and propagandized like pretty much everything else. The exploding of this image, the putting to the side of the negative associations that accompany living in a kind of isolation, is something that takes work. And this work cannot simply be putting it all away from your mind. That would be creating a whole new romance which is naive and fearful and untrue.

To think the isolation--and therefore the loneliness, the sense of limited possibilities, the different kinds of poverty and addiction that are found here--is to think this place in its fullness. But it's too much all at once and maybe that's what I love so much about this place. The simplicity of the landscape, the openness and the largeness of the sky; all of these reveal a place full of complexity and nuance that does not demand you pay attention but invites attention. How very middle western.

I have finished my first week of classes at my first non-religious school since high school. It wasn't as big a deal as I had feared it would be. Philosophy is philosophy and it doesn't have to be in a professors office for an independent study or in the magisterium known as BC to be well done. I am excited about my classes for numerous reasons but mainly because, after a summer of French and fiction, I'm back to the work that I love to do.

Living in Carbondale, I am without a lions share of the luxuries that Brighton, Brookline, and Allston provided as everyday occurrences. They don't have software to track the school shuttle, they don't have a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's or even a Target. I've yet to find a really great coffee shop to study in. The library looks too new, not enough stained glass and stone. Still, every day brings more comfort to me. Every day brings more acceptance and excitement to live in so simple and complex a place as this. To see the grace bestowed that is my time allotted here in southern Illinois, that is a task worth undertaking.