On Wind

"Botanists say that trees need the powerful March winds to flex their trunks and main branches, so the sap is drawn up to nourish the budding leaves. Perhaps we need the gales of life in the same way, though we dislike enduring them."

— Jane Truax

Truax reframes adversity as necessity. We resist life's winds - challenges, setbacks, difficulties - but they may be exactly what we need to grow. Trees that never experience wind develop shallow roots and weak trunks; they're vulnerable when storms finally come. The winds we endure strengthen us, deepen us, prepare us for worse winds ahead. This doesn't make hardship pleasant, but it gives it meaning. The gales we dislike may be nourishing us in ways we can't perceive until later, when we see how they've made us stronger.

"One ship drives east and another drives west with the selfsame winds that flow. 'Tis the set of sails and not the gales which tells us the way to go."

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Wilcox's maritime metaphor is about agency within constraint. We can't control the wind - the circumstances, the forces, the challenges that blow through our lives. But we can control our sails - our responses, our attitudes, our choices. Two people face the same wind; one is blown off course, another uses it to reach their destination. The difference isn't the wind but the navigation. This is empowering wisdom: we may not control what happens to us, but we always have some control over how we respond.

"The winds of grace blow all the time. All we need to do is set our sails."

— Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna suggests that grace, help, support - whatever we call it - is always available. The wind is always blowing. The problem isn't absence of grace but our failure to position ourselves to receive it. We leave our sails furled, or point them the wrong direction, then complain about lack of wind. The work isn't making the wind blow (we can't) but making ourselves receptive to the wind that's already blowing. This applies to learning, growth, opportunity, love - they're available, but we must position ourselves to receive them.

"The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears."

— John Muir

Muir acknowledges wind's mystery - it speaks in a language we can barely comprehend. We feel wind, we see its effects, but its essence eludes us. This is humbling. So much of reality operates beyond human perception. We like to think we understand the world, but wind reminds us how much remains mysterious, how thin the slice of reality our senses can grasp. There's wisdom in acknowledging this: intellectual humility, openness to dimensions we cannot fully perceive, respect for what exceeds our understanding.

"The wind in a man's face makes him wise."

— John Ray

Ray's proverb is wonderfully concrete. Wind in your face means resistance, challenge, having to push forward against opposition. This makes you wise through experience - you learn what you're made of, what matters enough to fight for, how to persist despite difficulty. Easy paths don't teach much. Wisdom comes from facing wind, from having to struggle, from learning to keep moving when every instinct says stop. The wind that pushes against us is also pushing us toward wisdom, if we don't let it push us back.

"True courage is like a kite; a contrary wind raises it higher."

— John Petit-Senn

Petit-Senn inverts our assumption that favorable conditions bring out our best. A kite needs wind against it to rise; without resistance, it falls. Courage works the same way - it emerges and strengthens specifically through opposition. When things are easy, we don't need courage. It's the contrary winds - the challenges, the resistance, the forces pushing against us - that give us the opportunity to develop and demonstrate courage. What looks like obstacle is actually opportunity. The wind that seems to oppose us may be lifting us higher than we could rise alone.

"Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."

— Kahlil Gibran

Gibran personifies wind as playful, delighting in interaction with us. This counters our tendency to see nature as indifferent or hostile. What if the wind isn't trying to blow us off course but inviting us to dance? What if nature wants connection with us as much as we need connection with it? Gibran reminds us that we belong to the natural world. We're not separate observers but participants. The wind in our hair isn't intrusion but greeting, nature's way of touching us, reminding us we're part of everything that moves and breathes.

"Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by."

— Christina Rossetti

Rossetti's poem captures wind's invisibility. We know it only through effects - bowing trees, rustling leaves, our own blown hair. This makes wind excellent metaphor for anything invisible but real: love, influence, spirit, presence of the divine. We cannot see these things directly, but we see their effects in the world. The trees bow, and we know the wind has passed. Hearts change, and we know love has touched them. This is faith in the broadest sense - trusting in realities we cannot see but can observe through their effects.

"When no wind blows, even the weathervane has character."

— Stanislaw Lec

Lec offers biting social commentary. A weathervane exists to show wind direction - it's designed to be blown about. When there's no wind, it looks stable, principled, having "character." But this is illusion. The moment wind blows, it reveals the weathervane's true nature: it goes whichever way the wind pushes. People are often like this - they appear principled until pressure comes, then they blow with prevailing winds. Real character isn't revealed in calm but in storms, not when there's no wind but when winds are fierce and we must choose which way we'll turn.

Closing Reflection

Wind teaches us to work with forces larger than ourselves, to flow rather than rigidly resist, to adapt rather than break. It reminds us that power need not be visible to be real, that the strongest forces are often the ones we cannot see or touch.

In our hyper-visual culture, wind wisdom is counter-cultural. We trust what we can see, measure, control. But wind reminds us that the invisible can move mountains, empty space contains power, what we cannot grasp can still carry us forward or blow us off course.

Perhaps most importantly, wind teaches humility. We cannot command it, cannot contain it, cannot even fully understand it. We can only learn to work with it, adjust to it, sometimes harness it. In recognizing our limits with regard to wind, we recognize our limits with regard to so much else: change, time, grace, the forces that shape our lives whether we acknowledge them or not.