Village Tale -Wind

We can’t pretend that there isn’t a significant amount of wind around here on the farm. The vastly inflated continent of North America has a slow leak out the Fraser Valley, and Yarrow is right where it whistles by.


My neighbour’s Adirondack chairs have been lifted off her porch several times now, and sent tumbling across the yard - sometimes northward, sometime south. Are they being abducted by malevolent forces against their will or .... jumping like rats from a sinking ship?
I had to write that in a much smaller font, because though it may be a theoretical possibility, it definitely isn’t true.



I suppose another explanation could be that the chairs are reacting like the black dog, who hates the wind ruffling up her fur, messing with her ears and honing her nose to a sharper point. She can react in a maniacal panic sometimes, taking out her fear, first by chasing the barn cats, and then the black pick-up trucks which barrel down the main street. The dog blames the trucks for being in a grand collusion with the gale, and can’t let them go by unchallenged.

On second thought, scratch that explanation as any kind of possibility for the chairs. They were hand-crafted by a gentle soul: his chairs wouldn’t want to chase trucks simply because it was too breezy.
(And rest assured... the black dog is now constrained by a leash, and the love of her owner, not to go feckless in a wind anymore. Fear is another powerful force ... this time, a fear in loss of life)

When I look out my upper storey windows across the gardens, fields and meadows, the shifting patterns of wind-tousled grass are an unalloyed delight.
When I’m having anxious thoughts, I can calm myself by gazing out. My eye glides like a seabird, skimming over the tops of waves and currents of subtle, but constant movement.
Birds can fly effortlessly, using the very energy that would buffet us, to their own advantage. Do you think we can learn that too?

The same wind that is so very beautiful in the tall grass, is relentless too, in how it pokes and worries at anything loose.

We want to keep our piles of wood, soil and sawdust dry over the winter...taking care of them to keep their value. We cover them with what we have handy ... plastic tarps. And then the wind softens, tears, shreds and spews the plastic into tiny, flying, tangling wisps which insinuate into cracks and soil clots, and onto twigs, grass stalks and sticky places.
On a single day, I can spend an equal amount of time collecting up long, blue, plastic threads from the garden and re-positioning a blue tarp over my pile of mulch. (Please don’t think that we here in the ecovillage are without our inconsistencies.)

And the Xmas lights outside my door, in a tasteful tree shape, are often at a jaunty, but un-tasteful angle in the morning after a stormy night ... or even lying completely flat on their noses ... which is hardly fair, is it, as the wire tree is mostly air itself? Why is the wind so inconsistent in how it presents? Beguiling one minute, destructive the next.

Our Village has a wind of a different kind, too ... the wind of change.
I can only begin to imagine, how it must be for those of our visionary members who’ve been here a long time, working with such dedication and perseverance to manifest their dream into a practical reality.
They invite us newcomers to come in, holding their doors open wide. And the gales blow in with us too, unasked.

I can see how the wind that I am, niggles at the loose places. How my noise rattles the corrugated panels on the roof of the barn sheds and then throws them onto the ground. My wind whips and dries the clothes hanging on the line. It pushes loose leaves into piles. And it shoves some doors open, and others shut.

When I feel that I am only a wind as I am here, then I worry that there is not enough space for me. Then I worry about the swinging, slamming doors; the niggling, teasing apart and the pushing at walls.

And then I am not alright.

I take the black dog down the lane and out into the pasture of sodden, heaving clumps of Timothy hay. This is the middle of winter; the lengthening days are not really yet apparent to me.

I stoop and see the green sprouts pushing up beside the old brown straw stalks. I watch the fog clouds rolling across the face of Vedder Mountain, dampening and obscuring some of the firs and then highlighting and featuring others, in a lively dark and light theatre of forest and tree.
I follow the black dog to see that the small animal who lives by the stream has left droppings filled with fish bones outside its hole.

What if I am not just the wind, but the stream too, and the mountain? And I’m the black dog who challenges, the pickup truck which roars, the chairs that fly, the old barn with the new roof and broken windows and the white tarp covering the pile of wood, no-one owns. What if I’m the stream in flood, and the bridge over it, the mountain hugged in fog, the rolling hay with spring in its roots, the fish-guzzling mink ( And if they weren’t mink droppings, but heron and there are no mink? Then I would be the heron and the mink) and the ducks rising up in squawking flocks.
And the houses with families and the weedy patch in the yard where the common house will be.

Then I would be the everything that’s here. I would be the right person, in the right place, at the right time.

I would be.

And we all would be.