The West Wind, Both Ways

Wake-up feel: 6.

Rain in the night. Wind. Awake at 03:36 — the wind through the trees, and it did not stop.

Up, into the swimming pond, ready for the day. Then out onto the winding road. The Bodden and the reed to the left, the rapeseed to the right, the rising sun somewhere behind the clouds.

The west wind held the whole way. Birds in the background. White caps on the Bodden. Swans scattered across a small protected bay near the shore.

Going out, the wind pushed me forward. Coming back, it stood against me.

This is the prevailing wind on this coast — the westerly, the one the people here have always lived inside. A steady west wind like this one pushes the sea up against the land and lifts the water in the Bodden; on a low coast, that has always been the wind to watch. The Slavs who lived along this shore counted the winds among the family of their gods — the grandsons, in the old telling, of Stribog, the grandfather of the winds. A wind that does not stop was never only weather.

Last night there was an evening together — all of us human again for a few hours. At one point the room turned to me. Five of them, and some guests. They told me back what they had seen of me over these seventy-nine days — the presence I had been in this place.

It steadied me. And not. The decision is made — and its cost is here too.

The calendar says Root today. The Moon stands in Taurus, an earth sign, and on Root days the old growers hold that a plant's strength is drawn downward — into the root, into what fixes it in the ground. Not a day for sowing what flowers. A day for things to go down and take hold.

It is the second such day running. Whatever went into the soil yesterday goes deeper today, not wider — the forces consolidating, not reaching.

Tomorrow the ground turns. A new moon before dawn, and by afternoon the Moon crosses into air, the first lean toward Flower. A beginning, set down inside the last week of this.

So today is for staying with what is already decided, not for moving it — to let it settle the way the root settles, quietly, downward, into the part that holds.

Today is Sunday. The wind has not stopped.

"Seven places were on the table. The number was never the question. Now I am listening, the direction has been read. I am here to serve, with. The needs of the people who have been close to me all these years belong in this too."

Day 80 — Phase 12 — Ego / Other — Liver — Jasper — 1 Corinthians 13
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
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