It was like it was tearing at my heart.
Crazy, sure, but that’s how I felt yesterday and couldn’t put into words. The wind isn’t quite as strong today, but the last 24 hours have been hell on wheels. It’s also gotten cold: 18 degrees this morning! But the wind… I still can’t really find the words, but I’ll try.
The sustained blowing of the gale seemed to scrape me emotionally raw. It was like having all the little protective membranes sandblasted into tatters. I just hurt, for no specific reason. Okay, I was juggling several guilt-producing overdue projects (ah, that may be the tie-in). But I started doing all the nasty things, like “reading” my wife, taking neutral setbacks personally, yada-yada. That stuff can build up, and by this morning, I was seething. I dropped a few psychotic time bombs in the comments on my favorite political blogs, a sure sign of imbalance. I reacted to the latest political news as if the country were my father. Good Lord, I almost unloaded on the love of my life. It’s happened before.
We are all, each of us individually, ultimately responsible for our own inner states. Maybe the wind was trying to tell me something. That’s happened before too.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
John, we have those long sustained winds here in Hurricane and I read with deep understanding your unsettledness with it. It makes people cranky. We also have the “Hurricane Rumble” which some people can hear and others, like my husband, cannot. Those that cannot hear it think it is a made up thing, but I have been experiencing it for fourteen years. No one speaks much about it and I’ve never heard a rational explanation. It is very intermittent as well, I have heard it twice in the past week or so, but it has been at least six months or more since the last hearing.
Well John
The winds seemed to have died down today…But what is in store now??? I agree, the wind IS crazy-making, but isn’t it GREAT? Without that wind, we’d have nothing to compare it to.
(Oh, and thanks by the way, that link to Tolle’s last book made me dig it out and start to re-read, it’s nice to be re-remembering again). “Re-remembering again”…hmmm…I’m no english major, but that sounds contradictory.
Thanks to both of you for commenting. Yes, wind will do that. In Bavaria there’s a sustained spring wind out of the south that traditionally drives people mad (called der Föhn), and I’m sure such phenomena occur elsewhere. In my case it was extraordinary (and quite revealing) how vulnerable I was to the crazy-making stimulus. Boy, howdy.
What is in store now is snow.
The NW onslaught will be followed by a backwash of warm humid air colliding with even more cold air to follow. It always snows here in April, sometimes a lot. Hard to accept if you’re jonesing for warm weather like I am.
And the mistral in France.
Cats act crazy on windy days too.
Man, a Fohn [add umlauts, please] sounds like one damned heavy trip of a wind. If you’re in one of them you must be in a funk so deep you might as well be reading the collected works of Arthur Schopenhauer and sleeping with a gun under your pillow. You are depressed as only a German can be.
A mistral, though, that’s an elegant French sort of a wind. You could be sitting at a bistro on the Riviera, drinking absinthe and reading Fleurs du Mal. You’re not really depressed except in a designer sort of way – you know you’ll soon be returning to Paris with your memories, which will only grow in the telling of them.
But if you’re in Italy, then you’re in a sirocco – same phenomenon, different word, different people. It sounds like you could be dancing on a table-top and drinking chianti from a goatskin somewhere near the wine-dark sea. Down deep, you’re probably a little bit sad but not so’s anyone would notice: Like Zorba, you’ve got your life to live. Carpe Diem.
The English word I favour is blow [as a noun] – as in 3-day blow. You’re just outright flattened. You’ve got the hatches battened down to ride the thing out, but you aint going to philosophize or poetize while you’re doing it. John, you’ll remember some epic blows in West Texas during the drouth years of the fifties. Those blows came with grains of sand that stung the face and darkened the skies. No point in trying to dance on tabletops or go elegantly crazy.
Got any better idea for an English version of Fohn/mistral/sirocco?