Raised by Wind, Rooted by Survival

 

The Wyoming wind does not ask whether you are ready.

It arrives when it wants to—hard, sudden, and impossible to ignore. It rattles windows, bends grass flat against the earth, lifts dust into the air, and finds every loose edge in a roof, a fence, or a person.

You learn quickly that there is no arguing with it.

You brace yourself. You lean into it. You keep moving.

Long before I knew the word resilience, I understood what it meant to live in a place that demanded it.

Wyoming is beautiful, but it is not always gentle. The landscape is wide and exposed. There are few places to hide from the weather. The summers can be dry and relentless. The winters can feel endless. The wind can move across the plains with nothing to slow it down.

Growing up here taught me that survival is often quiet.

It is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is simply getting up and doing what needs to be done. It is pulling your coat tighter, checking the doors, securing what might blow away, and carrying on with your day.

It is knowing the storm may not pass quickly, but trusting that you can endure it.

That kind of endurance became part of me.

It shaped how I understand strength. It shaped how I respond to hardship. It shaped the way I write.

My poetry collection, Raised by Wind, grew from those memories.

It grew from open fields and rattling screens. From grass bending low beneath the sky. From dust that settled into shoes, pockets, hems, and hair. From tin roofs popping in the summer heat and cold air finding its way through places that should have been sealed.

It also grew from the people who lived within that landscape.

People who worked with what they had.

People who repaired instead of replaced.

People who kept going without making a ceremony of it.

People who knew that toughness did not mean never feeling pain. It meant learning how to move through it.

When I began writing the poems in Raised by Wind, I thought I was writing about place.

In many ways, I was.

I was writing about Wyoming and the high plains. I was writing about childhood, weather, distance, poverty, family, and memory. I was writing about the physical world that surrounded me before I had the language to understand what it was teaching me.

But as the collection took shape, I realized I was also writing about survival.

The wind became more than weather.

It became every force that arrives without permission.

Every loss we cannot prevent.

Every hardship that changes the shape of a life.

Every season that asks more from us than we think we can give.

The wind can wear things down. It can strip away what is fragile. It can expose every weak point.

But it can also teach us where we are strongest.

Resilience is often misunderstood as the ability to remain untouched.

I do not believe that is true.

The strongest people I know have been changed by what they have survived. They carry scars, grief, fear, anger, and memories they may never fully set down.

Strength is not the absence of those things.

Strength is learning how to carry them without allowing them to become the whole story.

The land teaches that too.

Prairie grass does not survive by standing rigid against the wind. It survives because it bends. Its roots remain anchored even as everything above the ground is pushed, shaken, and flattened.

There is wisdom in that.

Sometimes survival means standing firm.

Sometimes it means bending.

Sometimes it means letting go of what cannot be saved.

Sometimes it means staying rooted until the worst has passed.

We often celebrate the visible moments of resilience—the comeback, the achievement, the triumph at the end of the story.

But resilience usually begins much earlier, in moments no one else sees.

It is choosing to try again.

It is asking for help.

It is resting instead of quitting.

It is rebuilding after disappointment.

It is learning that softness and strength can exist in the same person.

It is recognizing that survival is not the end of the journey. It is the place from which something new can begin.

That belief runs through much of my writing.

I am drawn to people who are rebuilding. People who are learning to claim space after years of making themselves smaller. People who are searching for language for experiences they once carried in silence.

I write about healing because I know it is not simple.

I write about desire because wanting something more can be an act of courage.

I write about survival because so many of us are still standing after things that could have broken us.

And I write about Wyoming because this land taught me what it means to be weathered without being erased.

There are parts of my childhood I remember clearly: the sound of the wind against the house, the enormous sky, the smell of dust, the feeling of running through grass that reached nearly to my chin.

There are other memories that have softened with time.

But the landscape remains.

It lives in the rhythm of my poems.

It lives in the images I return to again and again.

It lives in the way I understand endurance—not as something clean or heroic, but as the steady decision to remain.

I was raised by wind.

I was shaped by open land, hard seasons, and people who knew how to survive them.

The wind may have taught me to brace myself, but it also taught me to listen.

It taught me that even harsh things can carry a kind of music.

It taught me that movement does not always mean being lost.

And it taught me that bending is not the same as breaking.

Some landscapes become part of your memory.

Others become part of your bones.

Wyoming became both.

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Raised by Wind is a poetry collection about place, memory, hardship, and the strength we carry forward. What landscape shaped you—and what did it teach you about survival?