So, too, like water its color, the wind takes the shape of its container. It's in one's ears and line of sight. It elicits a childlike impulse to show off its gusty impact on the surroundings. How far it bends the trees without breaking. How wildly it blows through one's hair and and ripples shivery waves across the fishbowl. Like chasing the illusion of the end of a rainbow on the horizon yesterday evening, every color held in water droplets refracting light. Depending upon where we stand in relation to the sun and rain, the beginnings and ends of a million rainbows could well be all around.
I'm not alone in regaling the wind. I like what novelist Haruki Murakami wrote about it in his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1978):
"For example, the wind has its reasons. We just don't notice as we go about our lives. But then, at some point, we are made to notice. The wind envelops you with a certain purpose in mind, and it rocks you. The wind knows everything that's inside you. And not just the wind. Everything, including a stone. They all know us very well. From top to bottom. It only occurs to us at certain times. And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen."
And anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore (1867-1957) describes it such in "Song on Applying War Paint":
"At the center of the earth
I stand,
Behold me!
At the wind center
I stand,
Behold me!
A root of medicine
Therefore I stand,
At the wind center
I stand."
And again in “Dream Song of Thunders":
"Sometimes
I go about pitying
Myself,
While I am carried by the wind
Across the sky. ”
― Frances Densmore, American Indians and Their Music
