A Brief Meditation on the Wind.

I meditated on the wind the other day, sitting half-lotus in a half-decayed concrete garage in the middle of a forest, where we used to have our fires last winter. I sat with a friend and waited for my brain to start trailblazing, taking me into the truth of the automaton that is me, entering a state of flow, becoming a muscle responding to an electric pulse originating somewhere outside of me; I am only one small part responding to a stimulus. The flutist inhales the spirit, breathes it into the instrument, acts as lungs for a body-less entity, and the voice of the wind emerges. This day, I allowed the trees to do so, and listened to memories of the wind from another artist repeating in a digital plane.

I sat with my friend and could not open my eyes without being overwhelmed. So I breathed, and I stayed still, and I listened to the wind and the music and I smelled the air and I wondered if my cloak would be warm enough, and found that it was so. I drifted into reverie and out of it, felt the push and pull of heart-clingers, loved it all, or hated it; there was strong energy, but no real judgment. I've listened to my heart time and again, and it always tells me something different. I've reasoned with it, abandoned reason for it, given it space, given it attention, swaddled and freed it, fed it with good and ill, and never once has it been consistent. There is a wound somewhere I cannot find. A healing I cannot achieve. What guidance can such a thing be that beats as consistently as the wind blows?

I lay under the trees and the air rushed into my lungs, seeped out of them slowly, or quickly if it so desired. And I listened for the wisdom of the vaporous sea, wondered at the patterns that emerged within my mind from its variance: air rushing down claw-marks in the aspens, spinning through channels in the grain of the interior of the flute, filling a space and leaving it, dancing along the surface of the water, wisping into nothingness in the atmosphere high above, turning on itself at a moment's notice. The wind is treacherous, like my heart. What wisdom is there? What wisdom is there to be gained?

There are patterns, but not to be thoroughly obeyed. There are names, but not to be confused with realities. The wind is a fickle deity, a mischievous spirit full of tricks and power and voice. And it calls to me deeply, deeply. I cannot stay in my flesh when the wind catches me right, cannot remember my own name when the flute begins to sound. I am sent far, far away, and forget that I have not wings.

Memory doesn't matter here. It blows away like a slender candle flame in a sudden gale, whispers half its secrets and vanishes into nothing, and the secret is scattered like the stars about a new planet, which becomes a seed, which becomes a child wrapped in a cloak, which becomes a galaxy and an astral body, which stretches apart like light entering a black hole, which condenses in a moment into a nest on a once-halcyon sea now swelling to a moon-drunk wave in a silver and blue ocean somewhere deep in the eye of the mystic.

My friend writes poetry and I turn over a half-shaped haiku, forgetting that the wind cares not for structure, knocking over the pines, pushing the smoke out and pulling it back in. And I watch my jealous mind from my laughing mind, and it isn't unkind, and I drift on his words and twist about them, imagining a fire before us and I the smoke dancing in celebration that the ban has been lifted, and I am in the future then, and time is taken by the wind and left in pieces out of order, like the chess pieces buried by the squirrels in the village.

Down from the sky I am inhaled, a molecule in the lungs of God, traveling through the heart, to the brain, and I am torn apart into my bed, and open my eyes like a child with a thousand, thousand lifetimes behind me. The silk scarf has only worn away about a few inches of the mountain.