Mysterious because it's something I imagined, and I haven't been able to find experts who will confirm or deny it.
What’s more mundane than grass on the lawn? Short and uniform, perfect for barefoot play, and always (most of the time) you know what awaits the bottom of your foot the next step you take. This grass is clean and safe, except for the occasional ant hill, dog pile, or wayward wasp. It’s the best place to play soccer, if your soil and climate and parks and rec department will support it.
But the grasses of the prairie are entirely different. Given the chance to thrive for their entire life cycle, they can be 10 or 100 inches tall, and bust all sorts of moves on their way up. Some stay straight, while others do marvelous curly tricks. They send roots into the earth with equal gusto, and those roots hold riverbanks and mountainsides in place. Seed heads, like human heads, so diverse, so full of surprises, so expressive. I look at these, and I get lost in them. I look down at the dewy stalk, then up at the waving grain, I can see what I suppose must have been the inspiration for the first calligraphers. Could grasses be part of the story of the first written languages?
My great great aunt's calling card; handwriting from my childhood; Leo Klein's cursive guide; the book inscription of my grandfather, Richard Hanger; a temple stamp from Nara, Japan; calligraphy by German artist Petra Beisse.
Well, the histories of calligraphy that I consulted do not deny the possibility, but they don’t state it either. They tell you what the Greeks and the Chinese did, but not what inspired them. So I may never know. But I so admire Grandma’s lettering, I am in awe of the work of lettering artists like Jessica Hische and Petra Beisse (find them on Instagram), and I am enthralled by nature’s dramatic expressions. Sometimes the best thing I can do is to step off the treadmill of my busy-ness, and into the knee-high prairie. The day flies by if I let it. Ground-nesting birds, high climbing ticks, the constant motion of things, unexpected sounds and smells, and all these lines going every way, doing all these things. When I open the family cookbook from the 1800s, I see similar, lovely lines. They are all art.
What’s more exciting than grass in the prairie?
Cat tails at Sidie Hollow, Vernon County, Wisconsin
Grasses above the Aegean Sea, in Croatia
Marsh grasses on Lake Michigan, prairie grasses in Wisconsin and Kentucky, wildflowers in the North Cascade mountains.
Above photo: Ivy Shonka