Between Us

I turned down a lop­ing dirt road that divided wheat fields. The wind­mills were there play­ing through the changes with the wind. The wind­mills drew me. They are a new shape in my world, min­i­mal­ist, mod­ern, engi­neered to zero tol­er­ance and max effi­ciency, beau­ti­ful. They are tur­bines because they don’t drive a machine. Mills drive machines, tur­bines store power. The wheat is a mas­sive calo­rie bank. This was an energy field and I could feel it.

The wind was whip­ping and dis­ori­ent­ing. The tur­bines cen­tered me. I moved closer. From far away and close up, they are beau­ti­ful and sim­ple, per­fectly designed. My brain moves to pat­terns and to ques­tions.
Why are they placed this way?
They line the ridges where the wind rises to meet them. I think about the Irish bless­ing I grew up with:

May the road rise up to meet you
May the wind be always at your back.

Why are they spaced like that? Can one hog the wind?
Appar­ently so. They should be spaced at 15 – 20 diam­e­ters apart. Sci­en­tists at Johns Hop­kins fig­ured that out.

LIke me, they tol­er­ate com­pany but not too close. I like the idea of being alone together. I don’t want to be aban­doned or lonely, and I don’t want…blah blah blah, you get it. Fig­ur­ing out how to be close to me is hard and poten­tially bor­ing. It involves leav­ing me alone and stick­ing around. I will come to you, curi­ous about your will­ing­ness to think I am worth that. Because of the risk that that will bore you (as it should) I have real­ized that my ego-driven strat­egy needs to be chal­lenged or I will find myself bat­ting the air alone, Don Quixote style. As I grow up and rec­og­nize that this is a game, I let the wind blow us together quicker. I don’t wait around for momen­tous occa­sions, because they are all impor­tant all the moments are occa­sions. I give ground.

Still, in spite of my desire to desire to hang around all of you, the wind­mills give me solace.