"A plain stretched before him, broad and flat, with houses and sheds dotting it, and rich fields, pretty ponds, and mulberry and bamboo around them. Paths ran north and south, east and west across the fields, and chickens and dogs could be heard from farm to farm..."
  – T'ao Yuan-ming, from "Preface to the Poem on the Peach Blossom Spring"







1.
     Some years ago there had been a story that circulated in a small midwestern town of a young man who had hiked every hill and bluff in the drift less area seeking the very farm that he would one day call his own. It was an unusual goal for someone his age and although he had said it aloud to his uncle once, he could not bring himself to tell it to his peers, for theirs were not so much goals of a future land or trade or to tending of the earth. He did not know where such day dreams came from but could remember when he was young his grandfather's small farm nestled at the foot of a ancient sandstone bluff where it was told there was still one cougar who climbed at night to the very top and prowled quietly the ridge lines and looked over the great river by himself only to disappear into its hidden cave by day. There were parts of this dream that the young boy absorbed and he could see himself as both a grandfather and cougar at the same time and felt the need to both walk the land, tend to it, and become, as ancestors had put it, one with the world. For this he was generally seen by others as unusual and alone and his stories that he found for himself, full of some many things along the trails that he sometimes tickled, of course he kept to himself and learned to paint pictures and write words in his mind, the greatest of canvases....