Windscaped columns

"All I have to do is breathe???!!!" That’s what I wondered to myself when I discovered the harmonica at 12 years old, while in search of a musical instrument for a school performance. I just could not believe that all I needed was the wind to blow in and blow out from within me to play the theme from the then TV series The Little House on the Prairie. I think one could never have a better beginning of a kinship with the wind than a child can with a musical instrument (well, okay a kite, perhaps soaring the same height…).

Wind, as most schoolteachers will tell you, is moving air. It moves because the Sun heats the Earth causing warm air to rise and cooler air to move in to take its place. This "transfer" is what we feel as wind, because the Earth is always in search of equilibrium in temperature. Uneven heating from the Sun and the varying thermal capacities of land (whether asphalt, cement, clay, etc.) and water (oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.) complicate the movement of air. To make the wind patterns even more interesting, there is the Coriolis Effect, a principle that underlines the effect of the spinning Earth on the direction this planet breathes. The Coriolis Effect brings out the fact that a spot in the equator travels at a faster rate than a point near the Poles, to make the same 24-hour rotation. The Coriolis Effect would explain why the warm air from the equator that travels north would pass over ground slowing beneath them, curving the winds to the east and in the same way, explain the westward curve of winds traveling south toward the equator. Weather scientists say that this would explain the usual directions of storm systems in the hemispheres, counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. Unobstructed at sea, storm winds carry their full powers until they reach land where natural elements such as mountains and trees and man-made structures such as buildings, break their full strength into gusts.

Winds have been around blowing the way they have been ever since the Earth was born over four billion years ago. It is part of its story as well as a living co-maker of its story. It has been our planet’s appointed sweeper in the atmosphere, providing the season-driven, windscaped home for winged creatures, the whole-scale bearer of seeds, the cooling and warming hands of a planet ever-working to gain an equipoise amid the many other forces wielded by water, earth, fire and the five Kingdoms (Monera, Protoctista, Animalia, Plants and Fungi). Man, as a force to influence planetary change, warrants a distinct place, being the only "conscious" force in all creation (but some scientists disagree).

The wind also launches beyond a thousand ships and sails, propels our winged fleets, lifts our prayer flags to the heavens, whispers our wishes on candle wreaths as they float on a river, and sculpts the landscape and waterscapes with its power unseen unless reflected in the altered terrain or in the towering waves. The wind’s nature is to blow and afterwards, the planet is never exactly the same. It is mindless and futile to fight the wind, to fight change.

A few months ago, I lost my musical key. Slowly now, I am beginning to feel like a reed again, just like all of us do, when we allow wind, life, to pass through us. If we are lucky and it passes through the right columns within our soul’s architecture, music is made. Yes, as the Zen masters have been teaching us, all you have to do is breathe… and believe it or not, when you do, it will be "the thrill of a thousand clear cornets and scream of the octave flute and strike of triangles" as Walt Whitman promised in his Song of Myself. So, after you read this, go and blow your kisses to the wind. Watch how this planet will change…watch how you change.