The Nature of the Wind

The Nature of the Wind

I am my own experience. My own witness.

Lately, I’ve been paying attention to the wind.

I’ve always felt something in it. A voice, perhaps. Though to hear it, you have to become still enough to listen.

And yet, the wind is anything but still. It moves through everything. It stirs what has settled, carries away what has accumulated, and reminds us that not everything can—or should—remain where we put it.

I’ve been wondering about the agitation I’ve felt lately. Whether it’s something stirring within me, something in the world around me, or some combination of the two. Perhaps the two were never as separate as we like to believe.

We spend so much of our lives trying to settle ourselves. To understand what we’re feeling, identify it, name it, and put it in its proper place. We want to know why we’re irritated, why we’re restless, why we can’t seem to find our footing when, by all appearances, we have every reason to feel at peace.

And when we can’t explain it, we often assume something is wrong.

So we try to gain control. We try to quiet the feeling, rise above it, break its spell. We tell ourselves we should be more patient, less reactive, more accepting. We turn our own experience into something to be managed.

But what if the discomfort isn’t always a sign that something needs fixing?

What if some of it comes from the very effort we make to keep ourselves in check?

What We Learned to Leave Behind

Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow has been on my mind. We tend to associate the shadow with the dark, the sinister, the parts of ourselves we’d rather not acknowledge. And certainly, it can hold destructive impulses and things that require an honest reckoning.

But the shadow also holds the parts of us we’ve learned to reject for reasons that have less to do with their inherent nature and more to do with what we’ve been taught is acceptable.

Our anger. Our appetite. Our assertiveness. Our desires. Our contradictions. Our refusal. The wild, untamed vitality that doesn’t always behave in ways that make us easy to understand or accommodate.

We learn early which parts of ourselves are welcomed and which are not. Some expressions earn approval. Others earn correction, rejection, or shame. And over time, we become quite skilled at separating ourselves from whatever threatens the image we’ve learned to maintain.

Eventually, we may not even recognize the difference between what we’ve genuinely outgrown and what we’ve simply been conditioned to suppress.

We call it maturity. We call it composure. We call it being a good person.

But sometimes, I wonder if we’re simply becoming better at abandoning the parts of ourselves that make other people uncomfortable.

And what happens when we spend a lifetime doing that?

We become divided against ourselves.

We learn to distrust our own instincts. We treat irritation as a personal failure, contradiction as a flaw, and anything untamed as something that needs to be brought under control. We become both the prisoner and the guard, policing our own nature before anyone else has the chance.

Nature Does Not Apologize

Perhaps this is where the wind comes in.

Nature doesn’t apologize for being in motion. It doesn’t ask permission to change direction. It can be gentle, and it can be violent. It can nourish, destroy, renew, and unsettle. It doesn’t make itself less contradictory to fit our expectations of what it should be.

And we are nature, too.

Somewhere along the way, we learned to place culture above that understanding. We built structures, rules, and agreements that help us live together. There is value in that. Our capacity to regulate ourselves, care for one another, and recognize the consequences of our actions matters.

But adaptation can become estrangement.

We can become so accustomed to the constructs we’ve created that we begin to mistake them for nature itself. We confuse civility with the absence of anger, goodness with the absence of desire, and maturity with the suppression of anything difficult to accommodate.

We become more concerned with appearing composed than understanding what is moving through us.

And perhaps the real cost isn’t simply that we suppress certain feelings. Perhaps it’s that we lose contact with the part of ourselves that could teach us something through them.

This doesn’t mean every impulse should be followed or every feeling acted upon. Nature is not always gentle, and neither are we. An impulse is not an instruction. A feeling is not a verdict. To acknowledge something within ourselves is not to endorse it.

But there is a difference between meeting something honestly and trying to erase it.

There is a difference between understanding our anger and allowing it to control us. Between recognizing a desire and being ruled by it. Between making a conscious choice and reflexively rejecting a part of ourselves because we’ve decided it shouldn’t exist.

Maybe we don’t need to silence every uncomfortable voice within us. Maybe we need to listen closely enough to understand what it’s saying, where it came from, and whether it belongs to who we are now—or to something we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves.

An Internal Free Press

In Faces of the Enemy, Sam Keen explores the ways we construct enemies and the dangers of becoming intoxicated by our own narratives. He points to the importance of a free press and a vocal prophetic minority as safeguards against the intoxication of divine destinies and sanctified paranoia.

I’ve been thinking about that idea in a different way.

What if we need an internal free press?

A willingness to let the inconvenient voices speak. To question the stories we’ve inherited about who we’re allowed to be. To examine the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled rather than automatically condemning them.

Silencing a voice doesn’t prove it wrong. And the fact that a feeling disrupts our sense of order doesn’t necessarily mean it has come to destroy us.

Sometimes, what unsettles us is asking to be understood.

The Pearl Without the Irritation

A grain of sand enters an oyster, and over time, something luminous forms around the irritant. Pressure and friction become part of the process. A diamond forms under conditions that would be difficult to endure in any other context.

We love these metaphors of transformation. We celebrate the pearl, the diamond, the beauty that emerges from discomfort.

But we aren’t always so generous with ourselves while we’re in the middle of the process.

We want the pearl without the irritation. The diamond without the pressure. The peace without having to encounter whatever has disturbed it.

And maybe that is part of the contradiction.

We want to be whole, but we keep dividing ourselves into acceptable and unacceptable parts. We want peace, but we wage war against whatever threatens our idea of it. We want to know ourselves, but only on the condition that what we discover fits the person we’ve decided we ought to be.

What if the discomfort isn’t evidence that something is wrong with us, but evidence of how far we’ve been conditioned to move away from ourselves?

Maybe we haven’t lost ourselves because we’re broken. Maybe we’ve lost contact with ourselves because we’ve become so practiced at rejecting the parts that don’t fit.

What if the goal isn’t to become less reactive, less contradictory, less wild?

What if it’s to understand ourselves well enough that we no longer have to wage war against our own nature to feel at peace?

What if the thing we need to overcome isn’t our wildness, but the conditioning that taught us to fear it?

And what if what we’ve been calling peace is simply what remains when we’ve learned to silence everything in us that refuses to conform?

Perhaps these are questions we cannot answer from within the very constructs that taught us to ask them.

Perhaps we have to step outside.

Go Out Amongst It

So the next time the wind finds you, don’t be so quick to seek shelter from it.

Go out amongst it.

Let nature experience nature.

Feel it against your skin. Watch what it moves. Notice what stirs within you when you stop trying to settle yourself, explain yourself, or put yourself in your place.

What does the wind stir in you?

What do you see?

What do you feel?

And what might you discover about yourself when, for a moment, you stop trying to be anything other than what you are?