I’ve been working with Winrock for two years and am finally at headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. I flew here Monday morning, looking out the window at the bright sun and clouds, at  the green patchwork below.

When I lived in Arkansas years ago, I wrote an essay called “Out of Arkansas.” It was a play on Out of Africa, the memoir by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen).

My move from Manhattan to a mountaintop in Arkansas seemed as radical to me as Karen Blixen’s trip to Kenya must have seemed to her. And when I looked from the plane and saw the vast landscape below, I thought of the breadth of Africa and of the American West.

It’s a liberating landscape for those accustomed to more cloistered, forested Eastern environs.