As you drive from Kansas into eastern Colorado…and make your way north into Wyoming, you encounter a vastness. There is a wide openness that many people find freeing.

But I find it to be exposing?

It makes me feel vulnerable, exposed, ungrounded. I need the safety of rocks and trees, forests and mountains, summits…valleys…gorges…anything but wide, open, flat plains.

But that’s where I found myself for hours and hours. I felt like I might just roll away. To the east, there were rain clouds…but I couldn’t tell you how far or how close they were. And to the west, the sun was slowly falling through the clouds. The pink rays were reaching through, striking the ground, spreading out, taking up space.

There was beauty in the openness…it was an opportunity to consider the wideness of space…an invitation to consider what it’s like beyond what you see and know. It forces you to wonder about people in those other spaces. What’s it like to be beneath those rain clouds? Or to be touched by the pink rays of the setting sun? But at the same time, it’s exhausting. These miles of driving feel exactly like the miles I traveled an hour ago…wide and open and never ending…

But they do end.