The Best Thing About Wind
The best thing about the wind
is the way it plays around. How wind
toys with the dust and drops it, waltzes shirts
hanging out to dry, so they dance,
like goofy scarecrow ghosts.
How it lifts the hems
of green things, high-fives the pineconed crowns
of spruce.
The wind is always switching,
dropping off, coming up, dying down.
We fall for it every time. . . .
For frivolous wind,
we open our windows, forgive
everything. We wait,
like lonesome candles,
for a spark from the wind
on its way somewhere else.
-- Susan Steger Welsh from Rafting on the Water Table
The wind is whipping through Strawberry Point today. Displaying its frivolity in laughing leaves, in dancing curtains, on the faces of relieved survivors of the weekend heat. It's like the whole town is taking a deep breath.
If someone interviewing me for a large, international magazine said I must declare in one word for their millions of readers the heart of my spiritual life I would offer the word Breath. (It's never happened, but who knows?) As one who practices sitting meditation the breath is my companion. Without deep inhalation and rationing the breath, every song I sing would fizzle out and fall flat. It's the breath that gives a singer her oomph. Oojai breathing in yoga creates heat in the body, brings oxygen-rich blood to the internal organs and muscles, and provides focus in challenging asanas. As a spiritual director it has been my continual experience that most women would give almost anything to feel that they had a few more moments each day for a deep breath in solitude, for wider spaciousness and expansiveness in their lives. When sitting with one in spiritual direction, my calling with a new client is often to simply remind her to breathe. As a retreat leader, worship leader, and maker of ritual and song this theme appears over and over again from within me and from those whom I serve. It's like we just can't get enough. Even my email address quietly proclaims this love and longing: BreathingSpaces.
To me, breath is the center point of the Sacred. I am ever breathing in the absolute essence of all that is Holy. I cannot escape it. Even when my mind is feeling anything but still and my heart is all a-flutter, my breath continues. It sustains me and gives me life. It does not come and go with my attention. It is steadfast and constant.
Hildegard of Bingen, a kick-ass healer-singer-mystic woman ahead of her time, knew about breath. She likens us to a feather on the breath of God. Such a lovely image: our lives floating on the grace of God's sustaining wind. God: a singer singing her most passionate, most life-giving, most celebratory song. Us: the feathers dancing on the strains of her melody.
Oh, let us open our windows to this frivolous wind that blows where it will! Let us lift our hems a little higher to feel her breath caressing the tiny hairs of our skin. Let the curtains veiling our hearts flap, flap, flap and part to make way for the peace flags within to kick up their heels, high and rowdy and whipping in the breeze. Let us fall back into the breath of God and let our lives float in release and grace. Let us finally invite in forgiveness.
Let us, let us, let us.
Ready for more than the surface?
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