Wind

Another night certain a tornado – or, if not that, some other event that changes the color of the night sky to green or orange or red – was coming any second now. Our mostly woven home is shelter in the old sense. There is only a membrane of difference, fragile as skin. Just as I can hear everything outside when I am in (coyotes singing in the morning? was that real?), so I, sitting outside, can now hear that one of our bunnies is almost certainly destroying the foundations of our home inside; just being bunnies.

Dreams, too, seem to have a somewhat thinner membrane between themselves and wake. Pickle woke me last night with a dream that sounded like magic or prophecy, complete with a question for me I had no idea how to answer.

The interior of our home was set up with the four elements in mind. Our hearth is fire; our wash area is water; our lofty cloud-like bed is wind; our small shrine is for earth. Last night after Pickle’s dream, we realized we’d coincidentally set these elements in exactly the cardinal direction that made the most sense on the land. In our forest, the blazing sun is in the south – same as our hearth; the spring we hope to take water from is in the north – same as our wash stand; the powerful winds that keep me awake so many nights come here mainly from the west – same as our lofty bed; and the earth we tend hoping for the gift of food is to the east – same as our earth shrine.

When I was younger, I decided that coincidence means, ‘Pay attention.’ A few years ago, I decided that in some sense, attention is love. This is part of why I finally rejected social media corporations that view the world as an ‘attention economy’ and sees our attention, as well as our friendships, memories, and identities, as commodities to be captured by subtler and subtler, more and more integrated into our life addictions; and conversely, this is why relearning the simple act of attention changes so much for me. There are lessons in everything that are not accessible through logic. There is a limit to what you can logically learn from watching a pair of vultures dance in the sky. The work that I think we’re here to do requires profound, non-linear, non-verbal, taking in of the entire gestalt and producing a response from a patient, liminal place. I am grateful for how much help this forest gives me in finding my way back, again and again, to that boundless home.

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