A Tale of Loathing and Sorrow so near the Mountains

In-between me and the hills lie what we have been conditioned to believe is civilization. Hoards of grossly convinced people who dare not even look to the west, lest, they might have to consider something greater than their own measly existence in their common and custom built neighborhoods of perfection.

But yet, these are the people whose homes I am in daily and who serve as my masters, hour after unbearable hour.

These people exhibit no desire for anything beyond the front door of their home. And in fact, choose an existence that secludes them as much as possible from such passions or desires.

They all talk the same, act the same and exhibit no qualities that would make them stand out in my mind as to make them recognizable if I were to meet them a year later.

I can see it in their eyes as we speak, that they think lowly of me. If their hearts permitted them to do so, I feel that they might even pity me, because I did not live like them. They must believe in their own delusional psyche, that I yearn for nothing else as to emulate their existence on Earth. They have known nothing else for so long, or perhaps never, their entire lives.

They have no wonder in their eyes. There is no curiosity that burns in their expression at all. Their skin is pale and the wrinkles around their eyes are those of squinting to better read some hand-held device of convenience rather than the squint one has when gazing out upon a hidden valley landscape, so wide, and in such detail, that no two eyes planted in a single skull could ever imagine to absorb.

These people think to themselves when they look at me, I am what they were warned about. I was the example of what mistakes they could make if they didn't go to college, get married, buy that big house. I am the photo negative of what they always strived to become; the person they were most afraid of becoming.

I can feel they truly loathe me. At one time I thought maybe they envied me. I thought maybe they envied my freedom, my care free nature, my life free of stress, my stroll, my free spirit, my travels into and onto hidden mountain paths, down wild streams, my nights out under the stars.

I had not lost faith in humanity.

But I now understand their arrogance forbids them from believing that anything other than their own example of existence is, in fact, perfection.

I now understand that they sense my free spirit, but don't understand what it to be---

only that it is something inferior and to be quashed and exterminated. They see others like me and feel us to be cousins of the last surviving strain of Small Pox and that we must either be disinfected or simply wiped clean from the face of existence all together, preferably in some single ‘shock and awe-like’ moment of complete finalidity.

Near the end of the day, and it seems every day, no matter where, a gentle breeze stirs somewhere in the high alpine places, unseen from where I might be, and it floats down along the mountain valleys and through the hidden creek canyons; picking up the scents and energy of a spirit that, as a species most of us now find unrecognizable. And then, perhaps a hundred miles or more from where it may have originated, it empties into the populous, the cancer of growth, of human development, the tidy neighborhoods of suburbia. Like a quiet almost undiscerning wave, it can be felt, but it brings with it a primitive voice of who we once were and where we once came from, and what we once understood. I can almost hear something in the breeze, something that is beyond words, it is too complicated in its simplicity.

And for a moment, I feel energized and renewed and ready to face any obstacle. And it make makes me glad to live where I do.

And in its single second life, the breeze carries with it a message for anyone else who might care to listen...

-a voice screeches from an adjacent room,

"...can you PLEASE shut that window!"