The Overturning, Enlivening Breath of the Wind

 

The wind has been a wearisome neighbor this week.

Gusting and blowing, first from the north and then turning to return from the south as if to retrieve something forgotten behind.  Like keys.  Or a wallet.  As I age I increasingly know this kind of problem.  The wind, however, has been neither embarrassed nor quiet about its comings and goings.  It has blown, with gust and gale; wearying, and withering.  

The trash dumpster, emptied by the road, relented in the face of the unrelenting and toppled over on its side.  

The greenhouse door tested its hinges as the handle wrenched from my hand.  

The deck chairs slid in a patternless ballet.  

The chickens huddled in the sheltering calm of the run.  

Trees swayed like concert fans in the mosh pit.   

The prairie grasses leaned into an italicized landscape.  

Everything feels it, responds to it, succumbs to it.  However reticent, however pliant and resilient, the wind has us all, and does with us what it wills.

And then stillness, as if pausing to take a breath that, in exhalation, becomes yet another force to be pressed against.  

I don’t have explanation for why the simple experience of wind is so exhausting - how simply standing in place while the force of it presses and insists can weary.  Perhaps it is that the act of simply being suddenly requires an effort not demanded in stillness.  Neither do I understand why the alternation of its absence can feel so relieving.  But there it is:  the compelling, propelling sweep of its presence, and the centering peace of its absence.  

Or so it seems.

It has always struck me as interesting that in scripture the words “breath” and “wind” and “spirit” are all translations of the same Hebrew word.  The animating breath that brought Adam and Eve to life; the wind that drove back the Red Sea waters allowing the Israelites to safely pass through; the forceful wind that stormed into and revitalized Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones; the mind of God that Isaiah saw lacking in the people; the Spirit that gives life in the Gospel of John’s Greek translation of the word - the Comforter that Jesus promised; the Spirit that the risen Christ “breathed” on his disciples; the transformational wind of Pentecost.  

Wind, Breath, Spirit.  The compelling, propelling movement of the Divine.

Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German mystic, latched onto the Latin word “viriditas” to refer to this enlivening, animating force at work among and through us.  Typically translated as “greening”, the word signified for Hildegard that divine movement - force - that is the source of all flourishing and growth. 

 It’s easy to see this greening activity this time of year in coloring lawns and garden bed emergence.  And yes, that is viriditas.  

But emerging stems and greening grass could inure me to the truth that this inspirited movement is a force, pushing and rearranging, toppling over and breaking through.  

Like the wind.

This morning it was still when I stepped outside to perform the morning chores.  Righting the overturned glider in the yard, I lift my face to the quietude of the rising sun.  It is peaceful after the relentless bluster of recent days.  But I smile with the recollection of that old biblical word and Hildegard’s Latin equivalent, and wonder if this momentary calm is just Divine inhalation - the Creator pausing and gathering oxygen for the next billowing gust of transformational, generative, and quite possibly disrupting greening.