I have always wondered about America’s road medians. There must be thousands of acres of land that exist only to sit between one lane and another. As I walk to The College daily there is a median I must cross and when I stand on it, I feel betwixt, neither at The Saint Constantine School nor on the road. I am on the median, getting cut grass on my boots, looking at wildflowers, and I am free.
I am on “wasted” land and happy.
This is wasted land, but its very purposelessness sets it free. This is Texas dirt nourishing Texas plants that rarely face the indignity of human contact. I imagine there are medians in America with less foot traffic than the over-visited natural wonders like Everest or the Grand Canyon. Few there be that walk the median of Highway 59 from start to finish.
This is a place where nobody knows your name, nobody is selling, and nobody is doing anything- yet you can be in the city surrounded by possibility. The median is there and you can step on it and be in but not of the city. This is odd but wonderful.
You cannot, in fact, waste land, because land is under, around, and eternally beyond all our schemes. The land endures and so if I am mindful as I stand on it, I can be somewhere even if, at the moment, society says I am nowhere.
There is no “nowhere” if you can stand there.
There is one thing I meet daily that endures longer than land: any human soul. When I see a person, maybe under a bridge near home, or an illegal, or a stranger, I am tempted to see a nobody, but each man or woman is a soul created in God’s image. I have never met a person who could not teach me something or humble me. Every human is full of divinity, though that image is shattered. The shard of what was in a human soul, reflecting the divine light, is awesome.
There are no wasted people, only those choice has put on the median.
More than a few will make this no place someplace. Put a man on a median and he might, maybe, build an empire, but better still plant some flowers. He can tame the no place by making it a someplace!
Land endures, but people can do more than endure, they can transform.
The land we ignore is not hurt by our ignorance because it has no soul, no feelings. Sadly, when we forget a person is a person, we might end up harming people. The man in the median can decide and if he decides well can make the forgotten places famous and the median useful. God has given us the glory to create a new thing in an enduring manner… all our medians, The ‘wasted space’ does not really exist, it is only a false designation given to the land by men with no scope for the imagination. There are no men who can be enslaved and reduced to waste, just foolish us who cannot see reality.
Rachel Motte edited this essay.
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