“The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it.” Henry David Thoreau, WALDEN
Nearly two years ago, Joe and I moved back to a community after nearly 30 years of living in semi-wild places. I had no misgivings about having people around, although we’d enjoyed solitude and space for so long. People do not intimidate us; we remain true to ourselves in the midst of any crowd as well as alone in the woods. Both of us have a blessed capacity for inner solitude which is the only kind that matters!
My concern in moving from a woodsy home to a suburban community centered on the fact that we’d completely relished our natural surroundings. We had never tired of wild creatures for neighbors. We had thrived on fellowship with sun, rain, and wind!
In retrospect, I need never to have questioned the wisdom of our new environment. We have deer tracks in the park outside our door, great blue heron and sandhill cranes flying over all summer, songbirds galore, muskrats in the nearby lake, and WIND!
Wind is something like your pet cat: it is never completely domesticated. Murmurs and innuendoes of wildness accompany wind wherever it goes. The big windows in our condo home face a narrow lane, a wind tunnel open to the west wind as it whoops east. The channel of the lane crescendoes the wind into moans, whistles, rumbles, rattles, and screams—the likes of which we have, in the past, heard only on select occasions. Here the wind howls outside our walls most every day, in all seasons. We’ve come to realize that there are very few windless days in Wisconsin!
I love listening to the wind while falling asleep at night. I close my eyes and recall other occasions when wind was foremost in my mind: changing a tire on a desolate road in high blown Kansas summer heat; venturing out on Lake Superior among the Apostle Islands, on an X-16 foot sailboat with two of our children and a dog—not realizing until our craft sailed out beyond a prominent point that wind is king on that great lake; watching from a hospital window during a horrendous blizzard, as the hospital flag whipped and swayed in the violent gale.
Along with reliving the winds I’ve experienced, I think vicariously of wind on the Yorkshire Moors–setting the atmosphere for Emily Bronte’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS. And Scarlett, Rhett, and the Old South—in Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.
Wind–one of the most destructive, enigmatic, and unpredictable forces on earth. The voice of God. The “poem of creation”! I’ll never feel too civilized, trapped, or removed from raw nature in a home that is dominated by the whooping west wind!
Margaret L. Been, ©2011
Northern Reflections--glimpses of gold by Margaret L. Been 