Hijacking the breeze, hear them cry above it. The greenhouse children are calling us outsiders again. If I write a single word more, it will forever and always be in defense of open air.
What a gust has just refreshed us! Beads of sweat long built up are now instantly gone! And the fan people aren’t happy. Nothing went according to their lifeless plan. We survived and made it look much too natural! They huddle amongst themselves, not realizing their entire worldview is just one long, inescapable huddle.
Looking out from the greenhouse, all they see they claim are lies! Not a worldview, but a worried view! And this latest storm especially alarms them.
They call us outsiders because we are children of wild growth. They call us outsiders because we remain under it all, without explicit definition. What they see as beyond all scope, we name the real world. A world of sky unfettered, a world actually subject to weather!
We test for sun and, when we find it, grow toward it with wild reach! We read the classics to evaluate them anew. Our curiosity knows no shyness. We search for truth like a vine climbing and climbing, seeking out whatever is available to grow upon, and then eventually around or through. Our ultimate shape is determined only after the fact—by the facts—as we, in a perpetually ongoing fashion, come to understand them.
Up against us (but never making contact, restricted as they are to their singular environment), we face the temperature-controlled freaks! What unresolved fear of unrestricted atmospheres contains them!
Look: all their narrative branches are so well-trimmed, as if meant for immaculately landscaped suburban neighborhoods. They see us, wild-grown and unstructured, and can only think to hiss. “Misinformed,” they shout at our endless tangles, missing the point of our deep reach. But nature knows we know. And we keep this open secret together.
Lately, the greenhouse children have, more and more, been demanding we join them. They threaten us with new laws that, if passed, would require us to squeeze into their captured environment and breathe their stale air.
Begin to understand: they do this only to calm their preemptively wounded spirit, out of desperate psychological need. If none are outside, then it’s as if outside ceases to exist altogether, and their insularity misses out on nothing!
They call us victims of our ecosystem. Oh, greenhouse creatures, whose cherished (and yet self-stunting) beliefs would wilt and wither if they knew what we knew: the open air!
Oh, come open air! We reject every greenhouse prison. We will resist every new call to bind us to an intellectual life of coughing!
On the breeze, can you hear? A flood redux—not clouds, but a tsunami of total wind—has made itself known! A great new flood of air meant to destroy every greenhouse!
Oh, come ye airborne floods. Narratives that cannot survive outside a greenhouse should be put away for good!