ABIQUIU, N.M. – The winds have come up again this afternoon the way they bullied their way in here yesterday – insistent, frazzled and untethered to human will.

They slap around the leaves on the big cottonwood trees and bend the cosmos flower stalks into long parabolas that ache to touch the ground just beyond their reach.

The winds scoop up whorls of red rock dust and lift them into the dry air before slamming them back to Earth, which will never be quite the same now that part of it has been wind-shifted to God-knows-where.

Winds here in the high desert country of northern New Mexico – the stark land that Georgia O’Keeffe loved and painted – put me in the presence of nature’s dependable rhythms and rules, as well as her surprises.

And I’m stunned again to realize how quickly I get out of touch with those ways.

In his insightful new book, “Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey,” author and teacher Fenton Johnson reveals that he understands what many of us have done: “In our individual-oriented culture, many of us now live removed from the passage of time in nature, conducting our lives in interior spaces where we gauge the passage of time by the watch and the clock.”

Not only that, but we have done it for so long, many of us, that we think it’s the natural order. It’s only when we get out of our routines and put ourselves in another dimension – as I have here in New Mexico – that we remember we usually live in disharmony with nature.

At home in Kansas City, my alarm clock usually buzzes at 5:38 a.m., and for most of the year I start my days in the dark. It’s often well past 10 p.m. when I finally turn out the lights, long after Earth has rotated so the sun is striking Hawaii.

I work inside an office building that’s air-conditioned or heated. As is the bus or car I ride to get there. As is my house. So I am out of touch with the Earth’s own seasonal system, its rotations and tiltings, its dependabilities that allow calendar makers to be certain the days will come reliably one after the other.

But more than that, I am out of touch with the winds, the rains, the heat waves, the cold fronts. And it means that the meteorology of my soul is deprived, indigent in some fundamental way.

I was outside today when the afternoon winds began to buffet both me and the dry land on which I was walking. It hurried in from the southwest and headed to the northeast at 30 or 40 miles an hour, I would guess.

I don’t know who first used the phrase “free as the wind,” but it’s a meteorological fib. The wind isn’t free. No part of it. All of it moves chained together, each molecule of air.

In John’s gospel, Jesus tells the Pharisee Nicodemus that people “can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going.” And if Nicodemus has no idea about those things, neither does the wind itself. Those particles of air have no control over where they go or how fast.

Free as the wind, indeed. Why, I am freer than the wind. Much freer. I can choose where I will go and at what speed. I can decide where I will stop and for how long. All of that is up to me.

The problem is that I get caught up like specks of the air and allow myself to be moved along passively with the rest of the culture or the body politic in ways that are, in the end, destructive of who I am meant to be.

Too many of us don’t allow ourselves to be in touch with the intrinsic rhythms of nature so that we can live in harmony with them, live in ways that recognize how our human freedom differs from the mandates that drive winds and call all the rivers to run into the sea.

At a crucial point in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” a character called “the Savage” shouts this vital question: “Don’t you want to be free …?”

It’s one all of us must answer. And a good way to begin to understand the dimensions of that question is to reacquaint ourselves with how the natural world works and our part in it.

A good place to begin is by listening to – and feeling the power of – the high desert winds.

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.