In the three years since Cindy Crosby began her daily walks at the Schulenberg Prairie at the Morton Arboretum, she's learned much about the life cycles of the flowers and grasses that flourish there. But perhaps nothing has astounded her as much as her own growth.

Her epiphany came about two years ago during a spiritual and professional drought, when the lifelong Christian and longtime freelance writer found herself at a loss for words — unable to pray and wrestling with writer's block.

Seeking renewal, she trod the prairie's worn paths. She witnessed the death-into-life drama of a prairie burn and joined a group of restoration volunteers. Crosby recorded her experiences in a journal and made an unexpected revelation. There, tucked in the pages of her daily diary, she found not only her prayer voice, but also something else — the seeds of a tender new book.

In a slim volume of collected essays entitled By Willoway Brook: Exploring the Landscape of Prayer (Paraclete Press, $17.95), Crosby chronicles how she discovered sacredness in a landscape and reveals how her spiritual restoration mirrored the restoration of Schulenberg Prairie.

Crosby, 41, who lives in Glen Ellyn with her husband, Jeff, their two teenagers, and the family collie, says she didn't set out to write a book on prayer; it evolved as she connected with the land. It's a connection that Crosby believes can be made regardless of religious orientation.

"There is a spiritual aspect to the landscape if we only would open ourselves up to it," she says. "If we don't look at the spiritual dimension of the landscape, we miss a whole component of it."

Crosby named the book after the winding stream that cleaves Schulenberg Prairie in half, and she still visits it almost daily, perched beside the water with pen in hand or binoculars sweeping the vista.

When Crosby looks at the prairie, she sees a congregation of plants and animals akin to the members of a church community. She is struck by the similarity between the recurring liturgy of the church, she said, and the recurring annual cycle of the seasons. She notes that just as a congregation is moved and restored by the prayers and rituals that have been repeated for generations, the prairie community similarly finds seasonal renewal.

Crosby especially loves the dramatic changes after a prairie burn and finds it an apt metaphor for personal growth. From seemingly barren ground comes new life, an image, she says, "that you can learn from all your life."

That theme of generational continuance marks Crosby's newest potential project. After a few months of creative fallowness, a time that Crosby says was needed to allow her to "fill up again," she recently began work on a novel. She plans to reflect the lives of her great grandparents, whose former Indiana farm is being incorporated into a wildlife refuge. She plans to take her time, though, and let the prairie continue to nurture her.

"What I've learned from the prairie," she says, "is to be present and to let that be enough."

 

From "Pulling Weeds"

The prairie itself is an interconnected network of grasses and flowers, soil and water, fire and weather, birds and mammals, insects and people. It is at its best when everything is working together. When one piece of the whole is out of kilter, it triggers a domino effect. Let the wild lupine, Lupinus perennis, disappear from some prairie remnants, and the Karner blue butterfly, whose larvae prefer this particular plant, loses one of its primary sources of life. Sweet clover creeps in on the Schulenberg Prairie, and soon the richness of native plant life has vanished. The annual burn changes the vole and mouse populations. Willoway Brook runs low, and the dragonflies and damselflies swarm to lay their eggs in the shallows. It's a community of change. Each action influences another; each member of the community builds upon the efforts of the whole.

Photo by Ron Dahlborg.

Charm in the singular, beauty in the aggregate. Significance in the single cardinal song that pours out into the landscape, and glory in the flock of cedar waxwings' soft music as they congregate in the evenings by Willoway Brook. Without the individual, the opportunity for landscape is lost. Without the landscape, context for the individual vanishes.

A dependency that I once resisted forms in my life. Now it becomes strangely alluring. Community prayer is powerful. The prayers of many form a woven net to catch us, to hold us, and to encourage us when we falter.

From "Field Guides"

Writing is a way I figure out where I'm struggling. When I journal through a difficult circumstance, or write through a troubled time in my life or about something that I know needs to change, the act of naming it and writing it brings me closer to resolution.

Yet no field guides or writing about my observations replace the act of prayer. For a while, I was content to write in my journal and read about prayer rather than to actually pray. Empathy for this situation came, unsurprisingly, through yet another book. I found consolation reading Thomas Merton's sheepish words in his journal, The Sign of Jonas, "As usual I have to check my appetite for books and work and keep close to God in prayer."

If I sat in my living room and read about the Baltimore orioles on the prairie, I would have the factual information. But it's not until I make the practical connection — that I stand in mud under a tree looking through the leaves for the oriole, hear its song day after day from the limestone ledge, spend hours tramping through the prairie's fringes and margins looking for its distinctive hanging nest, figure out its habits (what it likes to eat, what tree it prefers) and sketch it into my journal — that I make the transition from learning about the Baltimore oriole to knowing the Baltimore oriole.

By Willoway Brook: Exploring the Landscape of Prayer, by Cindy Crosby. Paraclete Press, 2003.

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