What Brings You Comfort Can Also Be Your Path
Finding my way back to the Plains—and to myself.
As golden hour slips into dusk, you can hear the sound of wind sweeping across fields and the call of the red-winged blackbird. Summer evenings are spent preserving fireflies in jars as the tall grass sways at the edges of everything in the breeze. There is that familiar crunch of gravel underfoot as you step out of the grass, taking one last sweep of your outstretched hands, brushing your fingertips along the blades.
The Plains have a way of getting into your soul quietly, without announcement. You can take the girl out of the Plains, but you can’t take the Plains out of the girl.
I’ve lived about an hour from my hometown my whole adult life. The Great Plains have never left my view; there’s even a lake less than half a mile from my house that brings me back to the feeling of home. And yet, somewhere in the busyness of building a career, pursuing a degree, and showing up for everyone else, I lost the thread back to myself.
I was exhausted. Invisible in the way that women who hold everything together often are—present everywhere, seen nowhere. There was an expectation of who I was supposed to be, and I filled it the best I could. What I wanted, if I even knew, felt like a luxury I hadn’t earned.
So I went through the motions. The feeling of the Plains was half a mile away, and I was too tired to look up.
When I’ve needed to find my center, I picture a tallgrass meadow filled with wildflowers, with a slightly flattened path winding up a gentle hill. There is a tall tree at the end of the path. That is my comfort spot: the beginning of the path, through the tall grass, leading to the tree. I can hear the quiet, the breeze, the grass moving, the openness.
It’s been that image for at least six years now; if it’s been longer, I don’t remember.
But something about those long walks by the lake started planting something—an idea. Quiet at first, easy to dismiss. I didn’t know if I had the skills. I didn’t know if I had the confidence. So the idea just sat in the notes on my phone for a couple of years.
Then I pitched the idea to a professor, someone I hadn’t even met in person—just a face on a Zoom screen. A stranger, really. And he saw something I couldn’t see in myself. He didn’t just say yes. He pushed further, expanded the scope, and gently shoved me off the roof in exactly the way I needed.
I’m not naturally someone who self-promotes. That’s still a skill I’m working on. But at that moment, something cracked open.
It happened in the process of putting together my undergraduate thesis presentation—finding the words, reflecting on the work, articulating out loud why this project mattered to me in the first place. The thoughts had always been there. I just hadn’t expected what would surface when I finally had to say them.
A year of significant change and growth has a way of bringing things to a point. Everything converged—the work, the reflection, the life—and somewhere in all of it, I looked up and realized I was more rooted than I had given myself credit for.
I produce a public history podcast called Rooted in the Plains, where I tell stories of the people and places that shaped this region. The name felt right from the beginning, because rootedness is what this landscape is about. Not drama. Not spectacle. Just depth. Staying power. The kind of identity that doesn’t announce itself but holds firm under pressure.
And now? I’m just getting started.
The Plains are not a backdrop to my story; they are the story. The research, the history, the land itself. There are places to explore, stories buried in the soil that haven’t been told yet, people who have lost that thread back to this landscape and don’t even know it. I want to travel the Great Plains, dig into their history, and bring those stories forward—to connect people back to the land, to the past, to their roots.
To my roots.
When I close my eyes and picture my tallgrass meadow, with the tall tree waiting for me, that path seems a bit straighter. And as I look around, I realize I’m not at the beginning anymore.
