I am at once lulled and exhilarated by
the wind that is blowing.
There is magic
in the wind, this transition between what is now and what will come. There is truth and honesty in the wind. There is a
mirroring of the nature of Life and the life of Nature as the wind surges up
blowing; there is constant change around and in us. This is Life!, the wind cries.
As a little
girl, I liked to hide out when the roaring winds came. I needed my own private,
quiet reverie, to explore my exhilaration as the wind came, blew, subsided,
surged. This was the time of year when something different happened to the
weather, the landscape, the whole look and feel of the place. I hid and
rejoiced and drew pictures in the thick silt that was deposited on window sills. I loved how the leaves spiraled up and around, how they flew off the
trees like baby birds learning to fly – wobbly and yet moving ever upward into
the currents. There was sound, movement, continuous change, and dusty
leaf litter. And there was clarity. For one or two spectacular days, I had this
sense of lightness, of freedom. I knew in those moments that anything was possible. The wind honored the truth of my childhood: nothing
is constant, but there is always a refuge tucked away in an inner chamber. The
wind could take me into it.
The wind teaches me how to clear out the
debris, how to let the dust of lost expectations and dreams settle so that I
may redraw them anew.
Shortly after
moving to an island in the Puget Sound, I became so fully washed in the sound
and vigor of the wind that I created a bright oil landscape on poster board. I
recall that it was garish and overdone: offensive blobs lying like dark
hunks of mascara on an adolescent girl’s lashes. Still unskilled in beauty. The
outcome didn’t matter. It was the bliss of dancing, painting, moving my whole
body as the wind rocked my world.
Always this happens with the wind. I
happen. Maybe it’s the energy of the wind that charges me up, electricity in my
veins. There is hope and beauty and every possibility exists.
The fence fell
over yesterday: a cluster of vines grew up robustly over years, pushed their
thick stalks in toward the fence, and weakened it so that yesterday the small
gust of wind could finish it off. For the first time, I was eye to eye with the
old scared dog next door to whom I’ve spoken through a decayed knot in the
fence; he bared his teeth at me. I offered to him kind and gentle words and he
plopped to the ground. I looked at the fence and wondered if it makes “good
neighbors” or simply isolates us in our compartments of a life smaller than it
ought to be, more artificially disconnected than we actually are.
The wind is powerful! Like fallen trees
or fallen fences, I, too, prostrate myself in the wind.
All blog images created and/or photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
