Pioneer Women essays

Pioneer Women essays Wyoming liberates Ehrlichs soul from the deadening confines of industrial civilization, and at once provides her with purpose and meaning in her otherwise empty life. She comes because she wants to lose herself in the uninhabited wilderness of Wyoming; she wants to fill the void within her with the boundless land, hoping to ossify a numbness within, so that she will no longer have to think and feel. Instead, she finally feels alive, vulnerable to the lure of the land and nature. The very essence of her being is challenged by the harshness of her new way of life, forcing her to reconsider the core of her own existence and beliefs. Ultimately, it allows her to grow and understand the universal truths about life and what it means to be alive. Ehrlichs life is anchored by the land. The parameters of her life are defined by the land and its predictable indifference steadies her. She comes to understand that A persons life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of ones family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place. She discovers a different language, a different code of conversation, and an ethical and moral code which is unsullied by the spurious desires and meretricious greed fueled by conventional society. People share one eye, and although there is vast amounts of space separating people from one another, and although they live the majority of their days in isolation, tending to their individual plots of land, the strength and loyalty of the relationships among these people underscores their community. She writes of the profound silence that characterizes much of the human interacti ons; the few words that are actually uttered are replete with meaning and speak volumes. The wind, the "meticulous gardener, leaves everything raw...