I crossed states the other night (OK, and KS) that most people would call wastelands. To the casual observer there isn't much there, the scenery is as unique as the people that inhabit the land and call it home. Being the product of a farm boy, cowboy, and a professor has given me this perspective on life that most ignore, or neglect to see. There is beauty in every state...in every area of our country, in every experience,...and in life you just have to take time to find it.
I have sat in the finest restaraunts in the world, and some of the greasiest spoon cafes you could find... sat in the swank booths of the W's of the world...and the sawdust covered floors of a honky tonk...the Crown tastes the same...and I like and appreciate both equally...I have seen the Alps of Europe...and the wheat fields dance in the wind of my North Dakota home...and see Gods hand moving across both...I have conducted meetings in sky scrapers with mahogany conference tables and designer chairs...and conducted meetings in machine shops on a metal table fashioned for bending steel into form...I have sipped coffee in a Times Square coffee house...and got my own styrofoam cup and sat with my late Grandfather talking to the farmers at the elevator about their crops...and I cherish both...but the latter more. Sitting on the shores of Pang Kor in Malaysia...and ass in the sand of area lakes...has a the same yet different flavor. I have sang on the stages of Nashville...and in a bar where I was one of three in the room...but I sang anyways...I have ridden in the finest cars...and I have driven one I had to push down a hill to jump start. Sitting in custom made designer deck chairs...is the same to me as sitting in a deer stand on two by fours nailed to a tree for a temporary but meaningful time of solitude in the woods...I have fished with a stick and twine courtesy of a dead branch and whatever was available for anything in the water...and I have crossed the Ketchikan Bay of Alaska in a half a million dollar boat and caught Halibut as big as most people... I have trampled across corn fields, sloughs, and sunflower fields in search of game on the farmlands of home...and the Alaskan tundra holds my footprint as well as I stalked caribou and moose on a guided hunt most would call the hunt of a lifetime. I have rolled across the country coast to coast on my Harley Davidson...and covered that same spance of land from 50,000 feet.
I share all of that and there is much more...to say this...everything...every place...every time...and most people you come across hold meaning. None is better or worse than the other, all are unique in experience and form. Perspective grants one this look...as does a curiosity to learn and live life out loud and with purpose.
The fly over state of Kansas looks like a checkerboard of Josephs coat of many colors, from the air. This state also produces annually the most wheat in nation, and is where the Upper class...and those that would be called the lower, even homeless...get their bread. Oklahoma is a topographical conundrum of brush praire...and rolling hills...it is also where the suits of wall street are fortunate enough get the finest beef flown into the Sparks, and Brooklyns Peter Lueggers to eat ( both of which I have sat and partaken of their bill of fair), and in some of their minds change the world with their intellecual thoughts over a meal, and a glass of merlot.
Each needs the other...its up to all to understand this.
To be continued...
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