DEEP WEATHER

Another of the hundreds or thousands or millions if not billions of things I like about living up here on the mountainside is that we get so much more weather. And thicker. We get way more weather than they do down in the village or elsewhere on the flatlands, and I love weather. I love living so close to the thunder. Often by the time we get down to the bottom of the mountain the weather has faded away, and what they have down there is some watered-down version.

A few days ago an elder farmer friend who has a paddy down by the village stopped by to visit and view my ongoing antimonkey efforts (he got a good chuckle out of it), said he bet we get a LOT of wind up here... I hadn't thought about it in exactly that way, but he's right. Usually when it gets windy, we're the only ones up here.

It comes with the view. Strong weather. Deep weather. Not the shallow pallid lowland stuff they get on the ground, with the wispy fogs and wishywashy rains, slushy snows and clouds way high above: we get the storms right around our heads, with extra rain and snow, wind and fog, you should see the fog, you can't see a thing! Down in the village they can see their hands in front of their faces; up here the weather is so thick in a good fog you can't even tell you have eyes.

And the wind: wow, we get it straight from the source, direct and intact, unbent by buildings and whatnot, brushed clean by forests and polished to airy brilliance by whole mountainsides. We humans need a lot of weather by nature, I think-- good weather, varied weather, strong, deep weather, to keep us topped up, and up here we live right in it, like getting your water straight from the spring, not from way downstream...

Up here is where the weather happens first.