Photo by Vineyard Perspectives via Shutterstock
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Watermelon
Do you ever listen to what the wind is telling you?
Once in a Dutch town by the sea, the wind hit my hotel room windows so hard I thought it might burst in and carry me away.
To where?
“Love me, love me, love me, say you do. Let me fly away with you. For my love is like the wind,” Nina Simone sings. “And wild is the wind.”
There’s a reason that wind and passion are so often twins. And when wind bursts into your heart and carries it away…to where? Who cares! Art awaits, for as Billie Holiday tells us, the winds of March made her heart a dancer. But those are foolish things.
Who cares!
Walking through the park just last week, my heart heavy with a sorrow not of my doing, I asked the trees to carry my burden, and the wind promised to scatter my sorrows to the bees.
"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind is bearing me across the sky,” say the Ojibwe, one of the largest tribal populations among Native Americans in the United States.
Isn’t wind pollination a form of scattering of sorrows; a bounty created from loss?
”Let the wind blow through your heart,”
"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind is bearing me across the sky,” Ojibwe saying.
Following a series of ethics scandals, New York University law professor Melissa Murray, wondered if Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States John Roberts had lost control over the court amid its 6-3 tilt to the conservatives. She ascribed an altogether different surrender to the wind when she told MSNBC that Roberts was “out in the wind.”
There’s being carried away–”Let the wind blow through your heart”-- and there’s being carried off by capitulation.
Invisible is the wind, making of the trees dancers, dazzling us with motion. Nina Simone knew this and composed her song in such a way that if you can move beyond the dazzling dance of her voice, you are rewarded with the mesmerizing propulsion of her piano–as confident as the wind in its role as mover. The song ends on such a crescendo that you are left in no doubt how wild indeed is the wind.
Lose yourself to passion–pollinate!--”For wild is the wind.”
But don’t drift during an ethics scandal.
The wind, and your heart, knows.
"Listen to the wind, it talks. Listen to the silence, it speaks. Listen to your heart, it knows," another saying ascribed to the Ojibwe..
Lacking a Democratic majority in the Senate that could propel impeachment hearings into the SCOTUS scandals, the U.S. will drift along with Chief Justice Roberts as the highest court in the land continues to compromise the rights of so many of us thanks to compromised justices.
See the ways you are carried away, how they differ from drifting.
Let the winds of June make of your heart a dancer. Be carried away!
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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