Many people express impatience with these empty spaces but I find this nothingness enormously interesting. This vacuous landscape leaves my imagination free to roam and catapult into what often feels like a thousand ideas at once: each tumbling one after the other. In a classically picturesque landscape, my mind is too busy taking in the sweeping vistas and I cannot manage that flight of idea the bare plains induce. And unlike the classically beautiful places, a simple deviation from the linear traces of light playing on the prairie becomes profound and impossible to ignore.