Learning in the Wheat Stubble

Wheat Truck Provides Shady Vantage Point

Great Blue Heron Fishing in Oklahoma Farm Pond

Sitting in the wheat stubble in the shade of the wheat truck shortly before Earth rolled up and the sun disappeared below the horizon last evening, I put on my “owl eyes,” as Jon Young teaches in his Wilderness Awareness School. I moved my head to the left and stopped and surveyed the view with my eyes. I moved my head again, and, with the owl eyes, looked at the panorama before me. Next, when I moved my head, I saw the trees that hide the house where I live; only the barn was visible. And when I moved my head again, I saw the oil blossom, the out-of-place mesa. It’s not a view I see often, the view of where I live from the wheat field, and the home terrain is much more rolling, even more lovely from that vantage point.

When I looked below, at the ground, I saw a black beetle. Earlier in the week, as I sat there in the truck-shaded stubble, reading, I looked up to see a small field mouse staring at me. But it disappeared as soon as I saw it. I watched the black beetle, with its feeling antennae working in front of it as it negotiated lumps of dried mud and weeds. It goes in circles, scaling weeds and what must be giant hills, coming out where it started, then trying again. It seems as if it sees with its feelers instead of eyes.

This week during harvest, I’ve seen many turtles, snakes, countless birds, including Canada Geese and a Great Blue Heron fishing motionless and patiently in a pond. I’ve watched a kildere light repeatedly on a fence post, vultures soar overhead and marveled at the energy needed for quail to fly with their short wings. They barely make it off the ground and fly just over the prairie grass. I’ve watched the cattle standing stomach-high all in a row in a farm pond in the heat of the afternoon and grazing all together at the end of the day. I’ve swatted mosquitoes and various sizes and shapes of flies – from the tiniest to the horsiest. I’ve watched grasshoppers and wasps try to find their way out of the wheat truck, though all windows are wide open. I’ve watched the Johnston Grass and the cattail reeds blow in the stiff breeze. And my heart thrilled at the first cicadea’s song of the summer.

This morning, rain came in showers on the hour for three hours – at 5, 6 and 7 a.m. – totaling 6/10ths of an inch of rain and bringing wheat harvest to a halt. More is forecast for tonight and tomorrow. We only had 40 acres left to harvest and it was our worst wheat.

Yesterday, sitting in the breeze that blew through the wheat truck in mid-afternoon, I read this, written by Mabel Dodge Luhan, of Taos, NM, a long time ago and quoted in John E. Carroll’s book Sustainability and Spirituality:

I have never seen a look of anxiety, of exasperation over any kind of weather on an Indian face. Whatever comes in nature they meet it with acceptance as though it were right. They do not know how to resist natural things like drought or hail or cloudburst with anger and hate because they are so much at one with all the elements. They know they are themselves the earth and the rain and the sun, and when the sun sets they feel the peace and rightness of it. They watch the sun going down behind the horizon and they go down with it in a participation with its security and its gentle irrevocable progress that we have no experience of. We watch things happen in Nature as if they were outside us and separate from us but the Indians know they are that which they contemplate…Natural weather just can’t worry them, they have so much faith in Nature and in themselves.

Those words have changed me a little – helped me see again how human-centered we humans are; helped me experience that Earth is a living thing of which we are all part – many parts, but one living thing. I know more surely the black beetle and the mosquito and the heron and the Johnston grass and the wheat and the snake and the quail and the sun and the stars and the rain and we humans are “that which we contemplate” – all one natural world.