What the Wind Told Me
Myth, Breath, Gossip, Pharmakon
I have a core early memory in which the wind plays a starring role. When I was four years old, in 1991, my extended family was at the beach for the duration of Hurricane Bob - a storm that killed eighteen people and cost between $3 and 6 billion in damage in 2024 dollars. I remember the intense concentration, if slightly panicked, of the adults battening down of the hatches, reinforcing the windows of the house the nine of us had rented the day before the storm hit. Bob arrived overnight with loud, impossible sounds, knocking the power out. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt a dark that dark, in my child’s mind the light had gone out of the world, the sun would probably never come out again as far as I could tell.
Once the storm had moved on and the sky cleared, we drove to the beach to see how rough the sea was, how high the waves were. My dad carried me down to look, but looking was impossible because the wind was absolutely whipping the sand into our eyes at high speeds. I buried my face in his shoulder to hide. I hadn’t felt afraid during the actual storm the night before, but I remember feeling an awed terror, a bodily recognition of the force and power of these elements, wind and water. I felt too small and too fragile to face them, but there was also a thrill being in their presence like that - my own aliveness reflected in the danger that I felt in them.
Since then, like most people, my encounters with the wind have spanned the full spectrum from easy appreciation to fear for my life. It is pharmakon: the dose is what determines if it’s medicine or poison. From gratefully enjoying a cool breeze at the end of a humid hike in the middle of summer to lying awake in terror, alone in my little tent on the Appalachian Trail, sure that the high winds (which had blown out both of the forms of ignition I’d brought to light the little camping stove to cook my dinner) would blow down one of the trees I had camped under. Sometimes the wind makes you feel glad to be alive! Like the time we hiked to the energetic vortex in Sedona and sat on the round red rock looking out into the ocher cliff formations, feeling the huge wind encompass us, our wishes, our inner lives. Or hiding (”sheltering”) in what basically amounts to a large storage closet at the standardized test-grading facility I temped at in Iowa City one summer between grad school semesters, holding my breath along with the couple dozen other strangers, hoping the tornado warning would pass without incident, but someone is reading the news off their phone that a tornado has touched down one town over and we tremble.
I have meant to write about the wind ever since I started this newsletter and honestly I don’t know how I haven’t already. It is one of the most formative aspects of this landscape here in east-central Illinois, to the point that I don’t even think it’d be accurate to say that it’s a force that acts on the land, but rather is something that is innately a part of it - irreparably tangled up with it, sewn into it. It is the most-present presence. It is never absent except during the hottest, most humid parts of the year when you miss it the most, when it is holding its breath. This is very different from living in Iowa City, where there were many, many more tornado warnings - here in Illinois it just never really seems to quit but it also never gets up the gumption to twist.
When we first moved out here, the first cultural reference that sprang to mind was the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, before Dorothy and Toto get to Oz but everyone is running around in the wind and Auntie Em is yelling Get to the cellar! and Dorothy keeps trying to open that little gate but it keeps banging on her knees and she’s just holding on to her little dog for dear life. The wind, in me, inspired that kind of bodily panic in the face of this force of nature. Something big and scary is happening and you need to find shelter, is what my body says to me. But come to find that that’s just how you live here, these are just the regular operating conditions. And if you mention the near-constant gale-force blowing to someone who grew up here they’ll cock their head to the side and say, Huh, yeah I guess there is a lot of wind here now that you mention it. “Illinois hills” the bicyclists call it.
In folklore and myths around the world, the wind is the perhaps the most infamous gossip - it’s filled with stories of the wind as messenger, of people hearing things carried on the wind. King Midas’s secret becomes common knowledge because of the wind. The wind is a storyteller in an old Hans Christian Andersen tale. Ariel, the spritely air spirit of The Tempest, delivers the sorcerer Prospero’s messages. But the thing today I dread the most that is carried on the wind is off-target herbicides like glyphosate and dicamba, which have been linked to higher levels of cancer, especially non-Hodgkins lymphoma. While herbicide applicators aren’t supposed to spray if the wind is blowing over 15 mph (which feels already way too high), we frequently see crop dusters out in the fields around our house with winds at 20 and 25 mph. Prairie Rivers Network calls this “chemical trespass” - when chemicals known to be damaging to all life including humans are sprayed without regard for the proper weather conditions and “drift” onto other-than-intended properties, like the baby fruit trees in my yard.
What even is the wind? You all might remember from seventh grade science class but I sure didn’t. National Geographic describes wind as “the great equalizer of the atmosphere,” blowing from high-pressure weather systems to low-pressure ones, and all the associated moisture, dust, heat, pollution etc blows with it. It’s one of the reasons why there is no separation or “away” in nature. I’m thinking of the way wildfire smoke travels hundreds of miles from its originating fires, like how the huge fires in Quebec last year made it inadvisable to be outside (Forecast: smoke) all the way down here in central Illinois.
However, while this is true and real it’s also a particularly disenchanted way of thinking about the wind. What are some ways that other folks around the world and across time have conceived of the wind? Let’s start with a recent example, the first one that comes to mind for me.
“The Wind” is a short story by Ray Bradbury, published in the early 1940s, in which the wind is a malefic entity that seeks out the man who had discovered its mysterious source in order to kill him and keep its secret safe forever. Ray Bradbury was from Illinois and he made his writing career ascribing sinister intent to every mundane thing under the sun (see the short story “The Little Assassin” for the one about a newborn baby that will stop at nothing to murder its mother), so it comes as no surprise there. But I think he really gets at something about the wind, for me, this feeling that it would be happy to mow you and your house and all the tall trees around it down in its path.
“’Those are the voices of twelve thousand killed in a typhoon, seven thousand killed by a hurricane, three thousand buried by a cyclone. Am I boring you? That’s what the wind is. It’s a lot of people dead. The wind killed them, took their minds to give itself intelligence. It took all their voices and made them into one voice. All those millions of people killed in the past ten thousand years, tortured and run from continent to continent on the backs and in the bellies of monsoons and whirlwinds. Oh Christ, what a poem you could write about it!’”1
The ancient Greeks, of course, have some big myths about the wind. Zephyrus in Greek mythology was the embodiment of the west wind, son of the goddess of the dawn, associated with tender breezes, remembered for his unrequited love for the Spartan prince Hyacinthus, who he killed when Hyacinthus did not return his affections. In some accounts, the singer and poet Orpheus was the wind itself. The ancient Greeks also held the old idea of pneuma, “the breath of life” which animates all living things, also known as the soul.2 I wonder at this association between breath and wind and soul, I don’t know what to do with it except to feel it.
A different form of this idea of the animating breath also shows up in the Tibetan Book of the Dead as “vital energies” that flow throughout the body and mind. “In the tantras and related medical traditions, it is said that there are ten kinds of vital energy or subtle winds which flow through the 72,000 energy channels (Skt. nadi) of the body. These sustain life and include the energies which support various conceptual states within the individual’s mind.”3 Obviously I am not initiated in this tradition but I am fascinated by how detailed and specific (and clearly deeply felt) this understanding of the body is, and the practices for meditation, movement, eating, and so on that were recommended to keep these subtle winds in balance.
Myths from all over the world are full of stories about powerful beings who could control the external, environmental winds. According to Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Finnish wizards sold winds to sailors in the form of three knots, the loosening of which would provide escalating amounts of wind, and they were often blamed for the gale winds of spring. The controlled confinement of winds appears with Aeolus king of the winds in the Odyssey. He gives Ulysses favorable wind to get home to Ithaca, and all the unfavorable winds confined in a bag (of course, his crew opens the bag when they’re almost home and they are driven all the way back to Aeolus’s island).
There are also are some more interesting ideas of the creation/destruction aspects of the wind that I came across while researching. In parts of eastern Europe there’s a folk belief that mares could get pregnant by turning their hindquarters to the wind. My favorite comes from the Shawnee of the North American Plains: “The winds were told by Grandmother Spirit to respect all women and not to stare at them. Shawnee women will pull their skirts up to their waist to embarrass the winds, thus causing clouds to retreat.”4
It’s remarkable to me that wind transforms from something so completely benign that we don’t even notice it a lot of the time - air - into something that can flatten whole towns and sculpt rocks in its most ferocious form. And somewhere along that spectrum is where we like to be, from a cool breeze picking up on a humid day to standing in the face of its strength blowing, feeling strong, feeling alive or feeling awed and feeling small. It is ever-changing, an entity with many different faces. It is everywhere, so I don’t have to worry that I’ll miss it when we move away from Illinois. Let’s end with a little D.H. Lawrence poem I’ve come to love:
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them
From The October Country collection by Ray Bradbury. Ballantine Books, 1971.
“It is meaningless to speak of the soul in the twenty-first century,” says Meghan O’Gieblyn in her book God Human Animal Machine. “It has become a dead metaphor, one of those words that survive in language long after a culture has lost faith in the concept…The soul is something you can sell, if you are willing to demean yourself in some way for profit or fame, or bare by disclosing an intimate facet of your life. It can be crushed by tedious jobs, depressing landscapes, and awful music. All of this is voiced unthinkingly by people who believe, if pressed, that human life is animated by nothing more mystical or supernatural than the firing of neurons - though I wonder sometimes why we have not yet discovered a more apt replacement, whether the word’s persistence betrays a deeper reluctance.” God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn, Doubleday, 2021.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, first complete translation by Gyurme Dorje. Penguin Books, 2005.