I took this photo when the cold winds arrived, the sky was moving so fast right over me.

The Weather Channel has been nearly hysterical for days about high winds scheduled to arrive at the farm Sunday night and throughout Monday. We moved the garbage cans, shovels, and everything not tied down into the barn, we prepared the house for the power shortages we were promised were inevitable.

The winds were supposed to come bearing down on us starting at 7 p.m. Sunday, and they did arrive around dawn, they left the ground a sheen of hard ice. But there was nothing especially alarming or dramatic about them.

I did check on a weather site called Weather Underground, and they also predicted some wind, but a far less apocalyptic prediction than the much more commercialized weather channel.

The channel has many defenders, I’ve noticed, people love being warned and alarmed, perhaps brainwashed into thinking it will keep them safe. The National Weather Service (still in existence, it’s their weather than the big channels use) does just that, as they have for a century.

I love storms these days, mostly because they bring out the photographer in me, I love big skies and changing light.  And the sky of the Winter Pasture is breathtaking. There is not a lot of Open Sky around where I live, there is a lot around our little farm.

So all of the alerts and hyped-up video warnings do that for me, they alert me to pictures that I love to take.

I can skip all the animal videos and the dire warnings.

I gather there was hard wind in many places west of me, I hope all of you are safe and that the winds are dying down. Our weather alerts are in effect until 7 pm.. tonight, but I’m heading to my acting class, this is the last class in this section. Red and I are scheduled to do our story together Friday night at the Old Castle Theater in Bennington, Vt.

I don’t think I want to rehearse the monologue, I would like the monologue to be as natural and spontaneous as possible. Once I stopped trying to read T.S. Eliot, I felt completely at ease.  I have short quotes from Jack London’s “The Call Of The Wild,” and from Paul Tillich’s “The Eternal Now.”

The wind is howling now, and I feel snug and safe inside of my study, I have some incense left to burn and a candle to light. I’m going to the Post Office, there might be a $5 bill or two waiting for me from someone in the Army Of Good.