There’s a foul wind blowing across the land–
Hold on to your good nature, my friends.
I felt it keenly this weekend, and all day Saturday the phrase, “a foul wind is blowing” kept repeating in my head, even as I walked through the woods. The peaceful woods, where I go every chance I get to wash myself clean of the things I pick up that I wish I hadn’t. A foul wind is blowing, a foul wind is blowing…an evil spell that has affected us all. The id of humanity has woken and is running amok. A meanness is in the air–has been building for years but it seems to have crescendoed in the past few months, dragging even the most mild-mannered, careful people into its maelstrom.
Other thoughts were tracing themselves in my head this weekend, too, though. The first-year burdock that had grown almost exactly in the middle of the path–spindly and beaten down but still there, spreading its leaves–made me think of the random nature of life. A burdock growing here is stepped on and struggles to survive, while a burdock sown a few feet over, off the path, thrives. No blame can be attached to the burdock on the path–it was born where it was born, and according to the law of nature does its best to live. No blame. Just the luck of the draw. The spindly burdock isn’t inferior, and the thriving burdock isn’t superior.
The thing is, science is finding that plants are part of a complex network, and will help one another through that network, sending out nutrients and warnings about danger, and even killing off invading plants. So I’m thinking about all this and talking to my husband, saying that since all of life is connected, it stands to reason that humans are part of this network just as much as trees and plants–except we’ve been doing our best to destroy it instead of participating in the give and take. And Bob says, “Yeah, how strange it would be if I got a cut on my hand and the cells around it said, ‘Oh well, too bad. Tough luck. You’re on your own.’ Then my hand got infected and became gangrenous and I had to amputate it.” (Well, he didn’t say anything about gangrene and amputation, but I like the effect.)
So the thought of “no blame” attached to those who are sown in difficult places–such as ghettos, or Syria–and the thought of the network of life–how the refusal to participate in the give and take of life breaks the network–came together in my head alongside the “a foul wind is blowing” mantra and produced the little almost-rhyme couplet above.
A foul wind is blowing across the land–
Hold on to your good nature, my friends.
It is time for a full-on War of Love. This war has been building for a very long time, too–you can read about it in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Homer, the prose of Maya Angelou and Emerson, the fiction of Philip Pullman and George Eliot; you can hear it in the music of Beethoven, the Beatles, the Wood Brothers; see it in the art of Van Gogh and O’Keefe; study it in the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, laugh and gasp in pain and love and horror, swimming in it being transformed by it with Sherman Alexie or Leslie Marmon Silko. Of course this is just a taste, a taste of all the voices of humanity that have, over centuries, sung their souls for Thee Old Cause, the War of Love.
Don’t expect it to be easy, but take a step and another. Get through a moment and another, always turning toward love. Go home and be kind. Listen to your children when they talk. Watch them when they play. Cook wholesome, real food. Take care of yourself, love yourself, and love this beautiful world. Go outside and behold the beauty of sky, trees, wind, sun. Turn off the TV, throw away the fashion magazines and gossip rags and read again–really read. Read those you can trust and discard the rest. You’ll know who you can trust because it will nourish your soul. It will strengthen your bond with the goodness in yourself and others. Love may be roused to anger but it never counsels hatred. Ever.
