This has been coming for a while

It has nothing much to do with how I feel at the moment.

We stand, as a species, on a very thin membrane. This veneer we call society; a veil called civilization that we pull over the basic animal to try and make something more of ourselves. Our highways and cities scratched into the patient earth do not comfort me. Walking along this road I hear the prehistoric demons of the trees whispering behind the curtain. Their shadowy voices pierce my armour of science and education.

Into the spaces in my coat fly the wind witches. Their skinny fingers pick and pull at every seam and they whip sand at my eyes. Their whispers spill into my brain. What right do you have to walk along so safely? How dare you try to protect yourself against nature! Do you believe for a second that you are any less an animal than the shivering fledgling or the cowering mice? Throw off this shameful pretence of enlightenment. It is nothing but a mulish refusal to realize that one day you too will die. We, the wind witches, will carry away your ashes, and the earth will suck up your bones, and you will not be any longer.

My mind pushes out the wind and seeks Shakespeare. "What a piece of worke is a man! how noble in reason? how infinite in faculty? in forme and mouing how expresse and admirable? in action, how like an Angel? in apprehension, how like a God?" (that's from Hamlet). I see the wind push against the houses on the edge of a field. The skinny, witchy fingers do not reach the smiles within. The tree demons scream from their receding forests, but the cars that drive among them don't turn, and they don't tremble.

I step off the hard road onto the earth and it bends to cushion me as it bends to cushion the footfalls of a fox or a rabbit. The earth will love her animals. I want to apologize for so selfishly wearing shoes. I do not think the earth is our mother. A good mother would punish such abusive children for the destruction and willful ignorance. The earth is our grandmother. She watches our lives sorrowfully and quietly, wishing we would change but loving us too much to ever refuse us anything. Our mother died so long ago that we don't remember her; every war we fight amongst ourselves is just pissing on her gravestone.

It is day now. The snow and the wind are off doing their thing somewhere else. Just me and the sun now. I smile at him. He smiles at me. He smiles at everyone. He is a jolly old man, a friend of Grandmother Earth. He lives too far away to see what we've done to her. All he hears of us is the stuff she tells him. "Look, that one wrote a story about me!", or "This one loves my trees. How lovely." He just smiles away at us a bit blankly. He forgets his youth now. He also forgets he is old. He has no days to cut up his existence; he exists statically and constantly and forgetfully. It is alright, dear Sun. I will still smile at you, old man, because you are good company to our long-suffering Grandmother, and you will smile back although you don't recognize me.

Daylight is falling away. As nature breathes sighs of relief, our cities light up. Every street light is a defiant torch. We will NOT be good and go to sleep. We want to drink our lattes and listen to our rock and roll and read our books and go on with our lives. We don't want to cave in to this natural weakness, this restfullness that comes with the night.
Pity our belligerence, all you natural beings. It started because we wanted it, but we can't stop now. We are too scared to turn off the street lights because of the trees we have killed and the animals we have killed and all of ourselves that we have killed.