Prairie Rorschach

Rorschach: a projective psychological test that uses the active pattern of perceiving objects, shapes, or scenery as meaningful things ...

Some will look at a scene like this and immediately begin writing themselves into it, creating their own private little story. Others will simply wonder about the place’s actual history, wandering down every little rabbit trail their ‘noticers’ notice, hoping to sort out where they might once have led.

I find it fascinating and wildly instructive to pay attention to the ways my mind and imagination react to newly encountered scenes like this one.

Do I sense hopefulness …or despair?

Does the story my imagination conjures from the shimmering mirage between us hear laughter or wailing as it listens carefully for latent voices that linger in the prairie’s whispered breezes?

Were there children? Celebrations? Visitors?

Was this a happy place …or a place of ruin?

Was there once a swing in one of those now dead trees? Were there chickens scratching about beneath them? Was the water pumped up by that prairie windmill cold? Did it taste like heaven?

Was the place abandoned because of an untimely death? A violent storm in the middle of the night? An unseen contagion? A gunshot? A blizzard? Snakebite? Or simply because something better and maybe easier came along?

Was there a mental health issue right smack in the middle of things? Depression and despair at the intolerable solitude. Or was its vast isolation and panoramic vistas one of those things wildly needed and emphatically loved?

(I realize I’m giving away quite a bit here, positing some of those questions my mind asks…)

A little research could almost certainly help one piece together a better picture of the place’s real history but simply taking note of the stories that swirl about in your imagination as you gaze out across those vast fields and try to imagine back in time will tell you far more about you. How cynical have you become? How convinced of the world’s malevolence? How innocent? What are you longing for? What do you fear? How much of a dreamer do you remain after all those slings and arrows life has hurled in your direction?

I’d be willing to bet that, like me, a quiet little dialog began when you first scrolled to this picture… an initial gut reaction of either wonder, or apprehension and a sense of some unfolding story. Can you follow the thread back and find it? Take note of it?

Was this a joyous place? Or did some evil befall it that makes you fear its ghosts, should you approach? Every karma is valid, after all.

When we seek to understand and own our lives, we get to ask questions. How profoundly wonderful!

What do we long for? What makes us afraid? What does time-worn happiness look like?

(Please, click on each below to see the whole and larger image.)

Was this a happy place, or a place of ruin. There are any number of ways that a scene like this might make one feel. Can you sort out just where your mind went first?

I had to stop and contemplate this place for a quarter hour a few days ago. Couldn’t drive any further until I’d spent time leaning on a fence post, just looking… thinking. Feeling. I had such a sense of longing, somehow. I wonder what it means…