Rebooting meadows

Dave, you can't make a meadow from the top down. You need to start with small pieces, and let them loosely join themselves. And you may need ingredients you don't suspect. Here's the beginning of Kevin Kelly's description of one ingredient needed from his book Out of Control:

As an autumn gray settles, I stand in the middle of one of the last wildflower prairies in America. A slight breeze rustles the tan grass. I close my eyes and say a prayer to Jesus, the God of rebirth and resurrection. Then I bend at the waist, and with a strike of a match, I set the last prairie on fire. It burns like hell.

"The grass of the field alive today is thrown into the oven tomorrow," says the rebirth man. The Gospel passage comes to mind as an eight-foot-high wall of orange fire surges downwind crackling loudly and out of control. The heat from the wisps of dead grass is terrific. I am standing with a flapping rubber mat on a broom handle trying to contain the edges of the wall of fire as it marches across the buff-colored field. I remember another passage: "The new has come, the old is gone."

While the prairie burns, I think of machines. Gone is the old way of machines; come is the reborn nature of machines, a nature more alive than dead.

I love that he has put the whole text up online so I can cite it like this. And, as Janis Ian says below, I'm sure it makes more people buy a copy.