The Wind is not Random

Dian Parker’s essays and short stories have been published in The Rupture, Critical Read, Epiphany, Anomaly, Channel, Westerly, Event, Deep Wild, Art New England, among others, and nominated for several Pushcart Prizes.

Today there are shafts of clouds scudding across a pastel sky. One could ride them in all their finery, softly cushioned, to Algeria if so desired. Even the shadows seem luminous.

Yesterday the sky heaved. The wind smoldered, stirred the stagnant stuff, alerted buried fury.

Nothing is exempt from the wind. Not you nor I, nor trees, animals, insects, microbes, atoms.  You can’t fight against its will, rail as you might. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks.” Keep your rage close lest it loosen and you burn.

Yesterday the wind blew off the roof of the garden shed and uprooted the old white birch. After raking a mountain of last years maple leaves, they’re all back again, blown uphill where they’d been dumped the day before. So much for hard labor.

I had a boyfriend once whose salutation for every letter ended with ‘Breathe the Wind.’ This isn’t possible in Syria or in the Sahara during a Sirocco, “the hot, evil wind.” Or yesterday with 50 mile an hour gusts. It might cleft the shirt off your back. 

A gentle breeze today that only raises the dust, no thermals. The twigs move. In a strong breeze, large branches sway and seeds are airborne. In a moderate gale, walking becomes difficult and butterflies are grounded. In a strong gale, children are blown over, branches break, and only swifts are airborne. Yesterday must have been what they term “whole gale.” Trees uproot and adults are blown over. Or, like Conrad wrote, “Seemed to burst asunder under the quick mass of sooty vapours; and above the wrack of torn clouds glimpses could be caught of the high moon rushing backwards with frightful speed over the sky, right into the wind’s eye.” This kind of behavior can cause madness. 

My yoga teacher keeps reminding us to breathe; slow and deep, mindful. Pranayama, controlling the breath. When the breath is regular, so is the mind. Try sustaining this during a long one-armed balance. In China the wind is called “the breath of the universe.” The Christian Holy Ghost. Greek pneuma, or the Latin animus, meaning not only air but the soul.

On Crete one summer, the Meltemi, “the bad-tempered wind,” ripped the shutters off the windows and never relented for two weeks. Made it difficult to think, sleep, or go outside. Sand in ears, eyes, teeth. Slashing grit. Living became impossible. My boyfriend and I fought relentlessly. When the Meltemi ceased, I left the island, broken.

The wind makes life possible. Pollen to disperse and birds to migrate. Bees to pollinate by finding the scent. Wind allows for all kinds of detection, like fires and storms. Assisted Melville  in writing Moby Dick. “Toward the middle of the week, the wind hauled to southward, which brought us upon a taut bowline, made the ship meet, nearly head-on, the heavy swell which rolled from that quarter…it washed the ship fore and aft, burying her in water…leaving the deck as clean as a chin new reaped, and not a stick left to show where anything had stood.”

Complex measurements for the power of the wind were devised by the British naval commander, Sir Francis Beaufort, in 1805. This first Beaufort wind scale was divided into thirteen: 0 for when the wind was too slow to move the ship a fraction, ending in 12 for a wind speed too mighty for the ship to hold a sail. The force numbers also showed the wind pressure on a human body. At Force 1, the wind pressure is a mere 0.05. At Force 12, the pressure is a whopping 85. And…the pressures are precisely the cube of each force number! Divine Geometry revealed yet again (see the Golden Mean, Pi, and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man).

There is such a thing as space wind, the steady flow of charged particles inside the Earth’s magnetosphere. This plasma wind has only recently been detected. A planetary wind are light gases that have escaped a planet’s atmosphere, and the solar wind is, you guessed it, charged particles that have escaped the sun’s atmosphere. 

Years ago, hitchhiking through the Middle East, I traveled from Damascus to the ancient city of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert. This was before ISIS destroyed the Pearl City, ancient capital of the Palmyrene Kingdom. An old robed man with a long white beard in the souk told me I must go, and being young and mystically inclined, I took it as a sign. I had never heard of Palmyra but I found a driver with an old van to take me. After an hour, driving in the middle of the desert, we headed straight into a sand storm. The wind whipped the car, making it impossible to see. We hadn’t even been following a road, just one long sheet of yellow sand, stretching into the horizon. 

The driver stopped and began a long stream of Arabic. I had no idea what he was saying. Here I was, alone with a stranger, traveling to some enigmatic destination I had no clue about. The wind squealed and spun. It felt like the van would be lifted into the sky by the spiraling force. 

Suddenly, all at once, out of the wind tunnel, walked a man. He was dressed in a sheep, head and face covered, massive shoulders square as a block, his long robe swung wildly. He moved across the space of the windshield, looked me in the eye, and then vanished. In the next instant, the sand cleared and we drove on. The driver said something like comam, which I later found out meant shepherd. The wind had rendered the apparition into Krishna. Alien, godlike, impossible.

Photo by Mila Young on Unsplash