North and South Dakota

Empty. An immense space so large and beautiful only nature could make it possible.

Here space itself is not an absence but a presence. Space has features, characteristics, adjectives: large, beautiful, profound, meaningful, almost even philosophical. Nothing is missing here, because everything is space.

Being in such space, so huge and limitless, I feel so small and finite. I am more my body, and my mind and thoughts somehow carried within, now than I ever have been. The car I sit in as I hurtle through space at 65 miles an hour feels like such a foreign and concrete object, a bubble with hard and solid edges, as it travels through something that is seemingly infinite and vast.

We drive. And drive and drive. Hurtling through space. For hours.

We travel through the geographic center of North America: Butte County. There is nothing here, but space. The heart of America: both empty and full at the same time. America: void pregnant with meaning.

Night falls. We pull over in the dark to watch a meteor shower. Heated rock pieces from space do as we do, millions of miles overhead: Penetrate space travelling to something, somewhere new.

I am, and can only be, the physical. It has taken space, larger than anything I can possibly know, to divert my attention from a busy city-life, to me, to myself, to my body