Tag Archives: ancestors

the prairie and the sea…

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Beginning about 540 million years ago, the first of many shallow inland seas ushered in the Paleozoic and later the Mesozoic eras.

Shallow ocean waters covered a significant part of the interior of North America, including the region we recognize as the Great Plains. —Encyclopedia of the Great Plains

I feel a certain soul-settling when experiencing the wonders of the PRAIRIE and the SEA. I’ve been exploring why I am so drawn to wide-open landscapes.

My ancestors left Europe, landed on the eastern shores of North America, and headed west, eventually settling on the plains of southern South Dakota. I moved in a reversed migratory pattern—leaving the plains and settling in New England after living and working in New Zealand, Australia, Tennessee, and Montana.

I think my inherent nature, choices, circumstances, travel, and understanding all have played roles in why certain landscapes speak to me so profoundly. My native Nebraska friend, artist Elizabeth Bunsen and I refer to this as our interior geography. LINK: elizabeth bunsen’s instagram

I will forever be gnawing on the bone of my genetic inheritance and wondering if my ancestors also needed a lot of space to feel settled within themselves.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion…the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

—Dorthea Lange, photographer/journalist/my hero

homesteading women…

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cellular residue

Do you possess some form of heartache, pride or even a sense of neutrality, depending on how things turned out for your ancestors?

While researching the stories of female homesteaders on the upper plains one dominant trait surfaced again and again.

Women are remarkably capable of creating something out of nothing.

Leaving all things familiar to take a chance on a new life for themselves and their families was an enormous sacrifice, requiring great courage. So often they were very young women, ages we still consider to be children by today’s standards.

It seems that perhaps we all possess some cellular residue from the migratory ventures of our ancestors. This courage is exhibited (and often maligned) every day, all over the world, as people are forced to leave their homes.

They’re not fleeing for the heady chance to “prove up” 160 free acres as the homesteaders did. They’re most often trying to stay alive and feed their children, a brave migratory gamble in hopes of a better life.