Four Fields

"Without fields--no us. Without us--no fields. So it has come to seem to me. 'This green plot shall be our stage,' says Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fields were there at our beginning and they are growing still. Earth half-rhymes with life and half-rhymes with death. Every day, countless incarnations of our oldest history are played out in a field down any road from wherever we are. Yet these acres of shaped growing earth, telling our shared story over and over, are so ordinary, ubiquitous and banal that we have--mostly-- stopped noticing them as anything other than substrate or backdrop, the green crayon-line across the bottom of every child's drawing. It is in the nature of all commonplaces that they are overlooked, in both senses of the word: fields are everywhere but we don't see them for they are too familiar and homely; being the stage and not the show, they are trodden underfoot, and no one seeks them out, no one gives a sod. For Walt Whitman, prairie-dreamer of the great lawn of men, grass fitted us and suited; it was a 'uniform hieroglyphic'. It grew and stood for us and, because it goes where we are, we tread where it grows. Yet because it meant everything it could easily mean nothing."  --Four Fields, Tim Dee