Ah, the Wind

In my life there have been many experiences that have shaped the way I look at things. Experiences with family members have led to a deep appreciation of faith, of music, and of dice and card games. Friends have been influential in forming a love of acting, of playing sports, and of enjoying just sitting around learning more about people I don't live with.

Fear has played a vital role in my appreciation of wind.

I need to point out right now that I love the wind. On hot summer days, it cools the world as it playfully dances across fields and roads. It's usually soft and comforting fingers slide across me, like a beautiful woman massaging aching and burning muscles, relaxing all and causing a smile to slide across my face. Yes, I love the wind.

It hasn't always been so. I remember as a child my family loved hiking. We'd sweat and toil up the mountain side (how you can sweat up a mountain is beyond me), our hearts pounding, or at least mine always was, as we reached the top and rested, proud of the accomplishment and awestruck by the view. I can't understand why houses that are often described as being shanty and dirty can look so beautiful from the top of the mountain, but anyone who has been up there know that it truly is a breathtaking sight. Being the curious child that I was, I enjoyed seeing what over the edge of the mountain face looked like. Invariably, I would see the dizzying drop or steep incline below me, and begin to feel as if someone was trying to push me over. It was always the wind I attributed this to. The wind wanted to kill me.

I'm not sure exactly why I felt the wind had such malicious intentions. He (at that time the wind seemed a stern man, I've since learned that that is quite incorrect, the wind is most definitely a woman) was gentle enough in the valley, but on the mountain where so much depended on one step, he seemed brutal and unkind. The wind most definitely wanted to do me in.

I had this reinforced on a trip eastward for a family reunion. As is often the case in the Nebraska area, there was a tornado right when we were driving through. As we drove, you could see the Semi-trucks tipping back and forth, leaning in the wind, and it was frankly freaky. I was terrified, and my dad must have been concerned as well. We pulled off into a rest stop, where we watched the wind push garbage cans and later on vending machines around. It was like some big jedi was using the force in an attempt to make me hyperventilate, and it was close to accomplishing its goal. We were luckily only on the edge of the tornado zone, and it passed after about a half an hour or so, but after that my fear was set: the wind didn't like me.

For a very long time, so long that I don't care to admit to it, any breath of wind would make me tense up, ready for garbage cans to come rolling around and hit me, or roofs to break off and smash me, or just to be picked up and carried away, never to be seen again. This lasted a long time.

One day, though, I realised how silly it was to be afraid of the wind. So, on a particularly stormy night, I went out and had a conversation with the wind. I felt her pull me this way and that, I felt her scream past me in a gale, seeming to hurl obscenities and threats at me.

And then, in that storm, I understood the wind. It might be that it's just the changing of air that's trying to get from one very compressed and over heated area to somewhere not quite so warm, or it might be a plethora of scientific explanations, but I decided then that it was simply another one of God's creations, and that He was talking to me through it (or her, I prefer thinking of the wind as a woman now. Does that say something about me?).

Every time a cool wind blows, when trees sway back and forth in simple rhythm to the playing of the wind, I think of God's voice in my life, or I just relax and enjoy the sensation of receiving a free massage. Oddly enough, I relax more for those massages then ones that even the most gentle woman has ever given me.