Drawing our breath

The hills above Tehachapi, California are lined with windmills because the wind seems ever present. On our arrival there on a long weekend a few months ago, the wind buffeted the car as we exited the freeway and parked at a local motel. It's the wind that yanks the car door handle from your grip when you open it and sends a thousand plastic bags to their doom excoriated on barbed wire fences to be shredded into nothingness. But for a few hours after dawn, I found it slowed to the gentlest breeze while I was out shooting.

I wonder about silly things sometimes, breathing in this gentle breeze I wondered where it had been before it had arrived here, did it cross an expanse of the great Mojave Desert? Did it sidle down the mountain valleys of the Sierra Nevada? Did it waft in over the coastal ranges from the mighty Pacific ocean? And with my exhale do I send it on it's way back? Or push it on into the Central Valley to blend in with the smell of newly disked earth and dance with the waving tassels of yellow corn?

To recognize that I too take part in this sometimes gentle sometimes violent flow of the forces of Nature is humbling. That just as my breath, my molecules of carbon dioxide, intermix with the Earth's own breathing makes the world feel differently to me, that our lines of demarcation, our flags, our borders, our us's-and-thems are not as clear cut as we think. We breathe the Earth, the Earth breathes us. Maybe that's all we really need to know about the place we think of as home.

And here is a picture of Tehachapi mountains (where the windmills did not grow) where I drew breath for a time.