Winfield

There's a slow sweeping curve in a small river on the lower Great Plains, near a medium sized town in the heart of the rural Middle West. Here, the years roll on in a constant path from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. Canadian blizzards take their turn with fierce,blazing summers; the Hard Red Turkey Wheat sits green through the long winters and becomes briefly a golden sea in June. Every year in late summer, through the gentle haze of this Idyll, we bring boxes of wood and wire, simple homes of fabric and metal, meals for both kings and peasants, and anything else that exists in our hearts to bring our lives to contentment. For that span of days or weeks, we exist as men and women are meant to exist - along the banks of a slow and thoughtful river, beneath a brilliant sky full of woodsmoke and wary raptors, in the ever-encircling arms and hearths of our own home fires. The primal spell of playing music until dawn starts many on a journey into the past, but soon becomes a promise for the future, a way to survive the brutal heat and the Arctic cold, an ever-present ritual to discover the joys of love and recover from the the pain of grief, to know, at last, the music of our true hearts.

Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee. This is my introduction to his book of photographs titled "Winfield", which is available at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2033835. The rest of his extensive body of work can be found at http://www.urbannaturemedia.com/#