goodbye the wind

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POSTCARD#281: Delhi: This is the last whole month in the house, everything now coming to an end at the end of September. Goodbye this room, floor, ceiling, these walls, aperture of window looking out on to small garden, and beyond to the park where these exceptionally tall trees have given us so much shade from direct sunlight. Goodbye trees, goodbye everything deeply green tree roots and wide leaves in this warm humidity, growing even as we speak.

And always a rustling of the wind, I follow the movement of large branches lowering, rising, and see how the whole mass of foliage shifts in accord with the continuity of movement… the air displacement itself a manifestation of the wind. Where’d it go… have you seen the wind? A wind narrative that never comes to an end, a wind becoming animate intelligence, an unseen form, disconnected from everything. A wind that’s present in all places at the same time, a wind that enters into and out of all things as if it were something autonomous, an invisible entity arising and falling away, form and formlessness in a causality of change and movement.

There’ve been times when it was at its peak and I’d watch from the shelter of this window… sudden velocity of wind strikes the pane of glass against its frame, Bang! I fall back in a moment of shock and fear, as if it were a living thing! The whole garden in a massive transition of wind becoming foliage; metaphor becomes reality, magician, voodooist, witch, wizard of a wind in a nightmare of dancing trees, wild and waving, with a sudden pliability hard to believe.

Everything out there and in here gives form to the insane energy of a wind that enters everywhere and into every single thing. Blows out gusts, sucks in voids, spins it in a vortex and swooping down as if inquisitive about something, filling up all the spaces below there, then suddenly out and up, high in the sky where only birds engage with it.

The sudden sound of it when a huge bough appears, as if it were something alive, tumbles through the foliage in a rush of leaves whispering in thousands of voices that seems to crash like waves upon a beach, and rises up again in a great sigh of leaf-whispering. Waves upon waves of masses of clustered notes break upon the shore, becoming less and less in an ordered succession of movements.

Goodbye the wind that quietly gusts its way through the mind, my awareness of it rises as it rises, I’m more alert when it’s loud, and when it’s quiet again I feel more at ease. But only for a moment, another small wave of it becomes a parallel thought flow to a story in the mind; it never rests… swooping shadows plunging deep into patterns of foliage over and over.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
[Alan W. Watts]

excerpts from an earlier post titled Whispering winds

30 thoughts on “goodbye the wind”

    • Thanks Sutton, good to have you over here! It could be this writing style is a result of living for thirty years in countries where people don’t speak English. I’m forced to be a minimalist and have a simplicity of expression.

      Reply

  3. I’m so enjoying your blog posts today, Tiramit! Confounding WordPress only allows me to “like” most WP posts from the email that announces it to me, so today I could “like” it, but the other wonderful ones I read today I could not. WP has been unable to resolve the issue that is only a problem with my iPad, not the other devices I can use, but this is the one I use most. So know please that I love your blog! And you too. 🙏❤️

    Reply

    • Thanks Sunny for “liking” and loving. Yes, there are these glitches in WP, but could be it’s a loading problem at your end? Here in India we have fluctuating internet speeds (Mbps) and random power cuts every day, so it’s not easy to diagnose. If possible, I usually click on the title in the email and get through to the original blog site so I can “like” it from there. Anyway, it’s so good that you’re putting up with these difficulties to get through to me, so good!

      Reply

  4. Beautiful. Sometimes, if I’m meditating outdoors or near an open window, I stop perceiving a boundary between my own breath and the earth’s respiration in the form of wind. I suspect that’s because the boundary is nothing more than my mind’s invention.

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    • The air element, thanks for reminding me. Now that you mention it, it is hard to believe that there could be a boundary, I shall have to do a sit outside sometime to see how that feels. Reminds me that mind/self attempts to pull everything to itself, to possess. It’s always a conscious effort, a small nudge to get it to let go…

      Reply

  5. More beautiful writing pouring out of a fullness within, effluent descriptions of things many overlook. The writing is pristine like a placid lake. No vestiges of head pain to corrupt or curtail it. Unbound as a wild horse. ✨ellen

    Reply

    • Thanks Ellen, the image of the lake and a wild horse is inspiring. Thanks too for the reminder that there’s still that liberation from the ropes and harness of headache, hard to believe it’s more than 5 weeks. And I’ve nearly forgotten what it was like before the neural surgery.

      Reply

    • Thanks for this, reminds me of the Autumn season in the West, there’s not the same clearly defined Golden Wind over here, the leaves become green die and fall throughout the year. So good to bring it to mind…

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    • Thanks again for the T. S. Eliot reference, and the street scene seen by the street light. I feel so close to it, maybe it’s something that I unconsciously absorbed or acquired from reading TSE; word associations like the stretched metaphor that isn’t at all stretched, it ‘becomes’ the object and the whole sense of a location. Here’s my favourite section of the poem:

      The moon has lost her memory.
      A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
      Her hand twists a paper rose,
      That smells of dust and old Cologne,
      She is alone
      With all the old nocturnal smells
      That cross and cross across her brain.”
      The reminiscence comes
      Of sunless dry geraniums
      And dust in crevices,
      Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
      And female smells in shuttered rooms,
      And cigarettes in corridors
      And cocktail smells in bars.”

      Reply

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