We knew the wind, encompassing it with our minds, holding it in our bodies. Even when we leave the Great Plains a corporal memory stays with us. Every sound was drowned or carried by the wind, every smell wafted on it. At the summons of the wind the earth would lift and march through the sky. The wet wind was our comfort in that desiccated land, and the spinning wind our great fear.
Wind is air in motion.
Several powerful geophysical forces unite to impart motion to the earth's mantle of air. The denser, heavier air of polar regions responds to gravity by sinking. This separated rising and sinking generates a global flow. In the part of the atmosphere closest to the earth the air travels from north to south, deflected from the sinking air masses at the poles toward the regions of rising air at the equator. At higher levels the moving air returns from the equator to the poles, cooling as it goes.