I remember being a child in my grandmother’s home, an old family farmhouse perched high on the bluffs above the Mississippi River. At night, the fields and woods stretched into an all-consuming abyss, dissolving into a blackness so immense it felt absolute. It was not terrifying in the sense of lurking danger. There were no threats worth imagining, but it was haunting in its absoluteness.
That distance, that isolation, that bone-sharp loneliness—it was piercing, complete, and certain. The weight of it pooled into every corner: the spring lot, the wood grain of the hayloft, the oil-stained walls of the smokehouse. My grandmother was terrified of it after losing my grandfather, longing for someone to stay, to light up the void. I understood her fear. That darkness did not need hidden dangers to be unsettling. Its vastness was enough.
Beginnings carry the same absoluteness as that darkness: the isolation, the distance, the uncertainty of what lies ahead. I do not know why I keep undertaking them, but here I find myself once again, confronting that old sense of maplessness.
This is the beginning of Field Notes: a dive into the unlit spaces that I cannot ignore. Here, I hope to illuminate ideas and philosophies central to what it means to be. Field Notes will be a collection of explorations into themes of meaning-making, belonging, and presence—an attempt to piece together the immensity of this life and share glimpses of what I find.
As a poet, a teacher, and a human being, I have begun many times before. I have set out with no fixed point of clarity, no template, no model—just the pull to move forward. I have done this in my writing, my work, and the communities I have built. It has always been lonely, always uncertain. And yet, the pull to begin is stronger than the pull to stay in place.
If you are reading this, I hope you will walk with me. Together, we will move through the vast unknown, trusting that something new will take shape—a light that burns through the darkness, revealing the ties that bind us.ll come to find ourselves looking out onto what once felt like night but find instead something filled with the essence of what keeps us whole, and that may grow to be the bind that ties us all back together.
Matthew Leavitt Brown 