Richland County OH is a place in the midwestern landscape that is, in many ways, just like any number of other places on the map; but it has long been one of the unique crossroads of the U.S., and it has a most interesting way of intersecting with American History.

These stories collected from the writings of Timothy Brian McKee explore our rich past.

Here is an introduction to Richland’s cities, towns and villages: touring landmark sites, meeting the people who impacted our timeline, and understanding events that shaped our community.

Contact the author at: timothy.brian.mckee@gmail.com

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Notes:

Many years ago, when I was living far from home, my good friend saw that I was dangerously troubled, and, recognizing that the source of my misery came from being tied down to a very limited notion of reality, he undertook to lead me away from my despair. That day, forty years ago, my colleague touched me so powerfully, his influence lives with me still today.

He took me on a guided meditation.

Our journey that day was made solely in breath and light behind our closed eyes, and we traveled into various dimensions of consciousness.

Eventually, in the course of our pilgrimage, my spirit was led to lift so expansively that the very room we sat in could be contained within my chest. Then, as wholeness blossomed, the entire city could be seen inside me; and then I was caught in a vision so vast that the whole continent, and then the entire planet could be contained within my heart.

It is a transformative experience. It casts the world around us in an entirely new light and you never see things the same again—people and events and history all make sense because it all fits together into one organic life form.

That is exactly how I feel about our town. Mansfield fits within my heart, where it lives with a pulse.

Here, within the parameters of innate love, my explorations of this place are not limited to walking the streets and meeting the people around us today: I can go anywhere on the map in any era at all. I live in the great victorious decades of our town—its mighty industrial strength, its innovative push to defy time, its daring frontier escapes, with glorious music, and generations of neighbors who all exist at once. All of it right now and available—the past and the present in reflection, commenting on each other with equal voice.

So it makes me embrace, as well, all of those elements of life in our history that we would prefer to not acknowledge. Those failures of humanity live within my heart as well. Crimes and murders and mysteries. Struggling against fear, the dark and the light that shape each other.

Walk through the open door of our town’s being and you will encounter heartbreak and loss, because life has plenty of that. There is brilliance and genius. And laughing, and happy endings.

There are angry mobs and, at the same time, kids shouting on their bikes, and, at the same time, horses thundering on the track, and tires screaming round the turn, and the cacophony of people trying hard to do what it takes and still be heard over the squalling of a newborn.

All of these multidimensional strivings of our tender yearning to be alive—and to be the story of life.

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