There are two trees next to my window. They scrape against the wind, branches stabbing into the howling air. Leaves tear from their arms, whirling into white space. The trunks beat against the glass in an ancient rhythm, the rhythm that gave oracles and storytellers their words.
I grow weary watching the trees fight the wind. They bend and the tension to stay upright is obvious. I can feel them wanting to lay down, to rest, but some force which I cannot understand keeps them resistant to gravity. The storm bends them down with invisible hands, and yet, as soon as the hands are lifted for a second, the two trunks are upright.
Never weary.
Somehow the storm gives me life. Those are the things that bind us. There are places in the world that are desert, and those that are forest; there are oceans and cities and plains that define for us what 'home' is. But things like the moon and the sun and the rain and the wind- those things travel like God into omnipresence. I taste the rain, I close my eyes and listen to the wind. I am no longer bound by time or space. I heard this wind when I was five, struggling with sleep and listening to the trees craft fairytales. I tasted this rain last summer, back home. I saw this sky. I can close my eyes and feel the passion of days gone by, hear it in the howling of nature. I can imagine that there is Russian bread in the closet-sized kitchen, that the forest ten floors down is muddy with rain. I can imagine that my family is only 20 miles away, that I know how to get home from Chehov to Pushchino. Moscow can be two hours away, and love- just an open door into the city.
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