The day you wake up and realize you hear the wind differently is the day you know you have lived on the plains. I'm a child of rolling hills and trees, where we could huddle behind buildings and branches from the howling wind. True, we occasionally got the wild hurricane thrashing about and planting a tree in your attic. But those were rare once you got off the coast (and weren't dumb enough to live in Florida).
But I moved from those sheltered hills to the prairies. And the bison may be dead and the tribes quelled, but the wind is a wild thing. It blows and sputters, tearing up brown clods and throwing them skywards until even the moon is blocked. It whispers in the ear, rumples your hair.
Do you know the wind? I can't hold him for you. But if you listen, very, very closely, you can hear him calling. He'll sing to you of life's first crawling out of primordial ooze (but do you want to hear of that, darling? It's quite boring, really, just enzymes and proteins and self-assembly). He'll brag about the mountains he's pounded down, the seas he's ruptured, the holes he's bored.
Ask him where the birds sleep and he'll laugh. They are parasites only on his ancient majesty. He remembers when elements were barely past the supernova forging. He remembers the first rain, the first snow, the last dinosaur. For untold millennia, he's prattled on to the hills and the water and the sun above. What does he care for you?
But get a shell from his great enemy (from the sea came life, from life primates, from primates spaceflight and the only liberation from his tyrannical caprice). And you can hear his voice whispering, begging, pleading.
"Let me out. Let me be at peace. I am alone and free, but I am miserable."
I've been posting less the past two weeks or so. Although it coincided with the decline in the value of Steem (and then that weird rebound), my reasons were quite different. I applied for and got a new job. I doubled my income. I planned a move across the world.