“When you go outside, do you worry about your hair getting messed up in the wind? Why? Life’s short, why worry for small things?” That was a motivational speaker in my high school gym for assembly.
Painfully shy, I felt a sting of realization: Yes I do.
My hair being in place and my face being pimpleless were my primary obsessions.
There were bigger, existential worries at home, but once at school, my wavy hair not staying in place and the growing spot on my forehead wearied me with pondering.
It became a touchstone of personal growth then to be someone who went outside and felt more hair-free. It took time to outgrow this painful, critical self-consciousness. Not that How do I look is ever absent, but I’ve grown kinder in it toward me. It was fortunate that at 29 my hair turned curly overnight and more and more I just let it go and do its thing.
My appreciation for run-of-the-mill, each-one-is-different, not-too-strong winds has also grown with each passing day. I often walk after supper down the sidewalk a block or two just to listen from a spot near a friend’s house where three tall trees (no one seems to know what kind) make beautiful music high in their boughs. I love that sound of vibrant gentle winds in tree leaves. And how they dance while they play.
How each tree has a different-sized, differently shaped leaf and all together as a symphony, each tree makes a different sound when the wind blows through, and different winds blow through in various ways, so the music is always unique. Just like when you arrive in an airport in a city, and whatever language or dialect is spoken there, the collective sound of it is different from that in an airport in another city with a different language or dialect.
And I stand under trees in my neighborhood and think, How alive to be here with wind in my hair. How alive.
Lately I also think, when I walk in the marsh with the wind. How I experience the wind is how I live with my thoughts.
Sometimes on the gravel path between silent snowy white egrets and squawking geese, I gently hold my hair back, often takes several tries, the wind is so brisk and wild. So I can see better. Brisk wild wind prickles the face the eyes. Sometimes I just let it blow my hair to the moon and back and flip my head back to enable me to see ahead. When the wind is really up in the marsh, it looks like I have my hand on a Van de Graaff generator.
And sometimes it’s that amazing calm with not much wind at all. Just the occasional zephyr. Reminding me inspiration has in it spirare “breathe.” The earth breathing through the wind.
It’s not far from wind—Old English “blow”—to breath to breathing to inspiration to our thoughts blowing, the winds of the mind-self-soul-body that I breathe with and through.
When I’m in the marsh, I don’t judge the wind. I accept it as the miracle it is.
When I meditate, I don’t judge my thoughts. I accept them as the here-they-are miracle they are. They come and go.
The winds come, the thoughts come, and I let them come, and feel them without judging without stories.
What beautiful shadows on the sidewalk winds make of leaves dancing in the sun. The first movie.
The winds come, the thoughts come, and sometimes I hold my hair back gently or let the thoughts go gently, so I can rest so I can see better.
The marsh wind reminds me thoughts are weather, the earth sacred.
Increasingly volatile storms with dangerous winds, also remind me those grow with our own lack of attention to caring for earth’s sacredness.
May we return to the holiness of the earth.
May we know what is.
Listen to Carmen read this meditative piece on her YouTube Channel.