Wind

Today the wind conducts itself as a single constellated muscle, sustained in its intimidation & writing itself through every swaying bough & every spiraling browning leaf spun from its bark. The turkey vultures play vectors, circling without flapping their wings in great lazy arcs before sudden turns at ninety degree angles that send them shocking through the silvering sky. The waves crescendo & spill into each other, the dulled light of the swift clouds casting them in changeling hues of mercury & slate & dizzying electric white. Stepping into the gusting breadth of it with the kids, Whitman’s delight is bright & immediate, his few teeth showcased in the full display of a lasting smile. Ada’s birdsnest of hair lifts in a kind of song as she plays baby lion, coiling & springing with the force of the gales. 

I think of wind as such a defining author of presence, the same way rain or snow or utter songless stillness can be. The varied moods of the world in the abiding petulance of their declarative postures. How a gust renders the tree so much more clearly a living thing, or how the rain swells in the ditches to spur the rivulet to motion. Everywhere in the shadow of weather the latent immediacy of dailiness. & for us, humans in the midst of the actual world, if we don’t sound retreat under roofs, our choices are clarified for us: seek a windblock, put on another layer, face away from the heartiest gust, skip over the puddles, or damn it all & merge into the presence of an electrified world made unmistakable animate. The weather calls us unto its cusp, erases the past & demands the urgency of reckoning. Maybe that’s a bit much to say on a walk from home, but in the backcountry or on a dogsled a hundred miles from the nearest human, these things foment & come to matter such that the world looks different now, even from the comfort of a triple pane window looking out over a manicured lawn. I have been ravaged by weather, have sought that limitless conversation with it wherein I have been reduced to what is irreducible. The rest of it, what falls indoors or outside of the plain logic of the world, wants to excuse itself from the exigencies of time, from the particulars of place. & where precisely does that lead us? 

A dailiness unaffected by the weather but for its curt & perfunctory observation seems offensively nihilistic to me. I don’t pattern anything on faith nor lean much on belief, but I do conceive of our relation to the natural world as one contingent on a kind of supplication if we are to attune ourselves to the bright current of life, in all of its iterations. We know too well our fallibilities, our crumbling monuments, how our syllables submit themselves to the vanquishment of the win that carries them from our mouths. We are not enduring, but we can have recourse to what is, feel its lambent energy like a fine filament in our heart, a passerine’s song at the periphery of our dance. I am daily astonished at how far I feel from the world, when it carries out its busyness in the advancement of every hour, every second. One wearies with the entropy of its detail once we lay aside the absurd pretense of a gestalt. 

In the howling wind, the scatter of acorns over the corrugated tin of the roofs. The overture of the vultures, eyes balancing light & dark in the dappled parade of cloud over fallow field. The fulgence of life, its over-brimming, in the most ordinary of passing gales. Stand, & speak into it.