A Field

Cindy Revell

On impulse, I bought a little painting. The artist is someone I grew up with. We lived across a field from each other. This field. Or so it seems to me. As soon as I saw the painting, I remembered biking along my childhood road looking across the yellow to her house.

There can be much ado about a field. As poet James Hearst says in Truth, "How the devil do I know if there are rocks in your field? Plow it and find out."

It seems to me that when you leave a place—especially that first place—you carry it with you: the sky, the soil, its rocks (turned and unturned), the light, the heavy, the love, and the pain. 

It seems to me that art carries all this too, that interiority, acting as a kind of proxy for the told and untold stories, and ultimately a means to plow a field in one's heart.