I stood for long periods listening, alert to what I might perceive under the snow, trying in vain to hear the tiny lives there getting about their business and resolving to learn more about their world in whatever time I have left on the land. And I listened too, between the clang of the first Payloader scoop of frozen sugar beets to hit the bottom of the semi trailer three miles to the northwest and the sound of another Payloader revving as it hit the silage pile at the ten thousand cow dairy factory just two miles north and it seemed to me that we have missed the point and have gone on a long tangent and that if we are ever to belong here, to become native to this place, we have to begin to get quiet enough to think we hear the wind in the eight foot prairie grass, the sound our grandfathers heard in this place.
The solutions to our lives in this place will only come in the quiet and humility of a man, any man, or woman willing to stand and try to hear the sounds of life among the clatter of industry. They cannot be theorized, or imposed from above, or bought and paid for.
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