It is drawing nigh unto two in the morning, and here I sit (again) in front of a computer screen. Outside the windows the wind is winding itself up, scattering my papers across the table behind me and throwing small twigs from the trees into the yard. Soon full storms are supposed to erupt. Not to worry, the weatherman tells us, the tornadoes that are likely to form tonight should be small ones. Both girls were downstairs moments ago complaining of the heat. When I went to check, they'd turned off the fan and closed all the windows upstairs. No wonder. I opened the windows, plugged in the fan and tucked them back in, reassuring them that I'd come shut the windows again when the rain begins.
I hated closed windows as a child. My attic rooms were always hot and stuffy, the indoor silences thick around my face, stifling. I needed wind across my skin and the sound of peeper song and insect chants to lull me to sleep, reminders that the world was a bigger place than my bed, my little room, my parents' house. Some of my favorite nighttime memories are of sleeping outside under an open sky and waking to watch the treetops dance wildly as the wind picked up, and faint rumbles and flashes of distant light in the west announced the approach of more powerful weather.
I grew up attending stuffy churches with shut windows, but the faith I somehow stumbled into anyway remains. I don't know why I still believe, given the effort I've undergone to abandon that faith and the often excruciating difficulty of the journeys I've had to make to reclaim it. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the story rings true to me with a deeper truth than fact alone. Like fairy tales, it carries something I need to survive: adventure, beauty, strength, hope, a wind that blows from beyond the edge of the small world I've known, a wind that throws my life into crazed disorder and makes breath possible.
Faith and Faerie, I've been told, are incompatible. One cannot believe in both miracle and magic. One should not open windows in the wind.
Phooey.
5 comments:
I second that "phooey" and add a "balderdash"!
Lovely, lovely writing, my dear friend, and Truth spoken. Surely we need the wind to bring us the notes from Faerie that give us a reason to embrace Faith . . . If this world were all we know, we could only despair; Faith would be irrelevant.
Yes, excellent writing. As a writer wannabee you are very inspiring.
And of course you know I love meditations and appreciation of nature.
very cool.
Beth--I originally wrote this for a different blog but then decided to post here anyway and hope some of my more conservative Christian readers wouldn't freak at the use of the word "magic." Thanks for understanding.
Randy--Thank you for your writing compliment. You will write a book long before I do, and it will not surprise me if within it are elements of meditation and appreciation of nature Randy-flavored. :)
Love this, Cindy. I'm glad you are a blender (makes the most sensory sense after all).
Teri
Wonderful blog. The wind cleanses the air so that we can breathe freely. And I believe the fairy stories are a bit like that wind, cleansing our mental palates from time to time, freeing us up from a bit of the clutter that can gather and stirring the pot, so to speak. They allow our thoughts to flow freely again afterward as we ponder them.
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