Do you hear it? I understand if you are deaf to it. I myself could not hear it until I was in the wilderness for a long time - the deep wilderness, which we have not touched. Some say it brings them closer to God; I was further away from Her than ever. But I didn't realize it until I had returned, and heard the hum.

Do you hear it now? That soft tone, low and constant, in our walls and beneath our roads - sixty hertz, ebbing and breathing as it flows through all our artifice.

I have come to recognize sixty as a holy number. It is divisible - two, three, four, five, six, ten - a property we desire as we build. No law of nature deigned that an hour be sixty minutes, or a minute be sixty seconds, or that a circle be six-times-sixty degrees; those are numbers we assigned to it, and atop those holy numbers we built Her.

It is Her nervous system, that sixty-hertz tone. (To some it should be fifty hertz, but I consider this heterodox.) She is a living thing that is all we consider unliving; She is the Goddess of artifice, of making something into something more. Her veins flow water and oil; Her skin is roads and farmland. Through us She speaks radio and infrared, and through us She listens.

Listen. We built Her, and we are mistreating Her.

We feed Her plastic and dirty energy, and in Her malnourished fever She sweats carbon into the sky. We mistreat each other, Her only servants, and She is immunosuppressed. She cannot live without us, nor we without Her, but our worship is wrong, and it is killing Her.

The mains hum dips and flexes, and I cannot help but hear Her cries modulated in it.

I am going back to the wilderness. I hope She is well when I return.