With the Wind

Reflection: #52

I stood outside as the storm front approached.  The wind picked up and I felt the force of it on my face, the sound of it increasing, blowing through leaves in the trees, toppling pillows off the outdoor furniture, whistling through openings between fenceposts, finding all manner of obstacles in its way.  

I read somewhere that it's not the wind itself that makes the noise, but that it's the resistance of the obstacles in the way.  When the wind blows, it actually makes no sound, the flow of it is complete silence until it encounters resistance.  

Reality flows like the wind.  Have you ever noticed that mystics always talk about how, once you accept things as they are, that life simply flows?  Those few who truly have let go and dissolved into the wind, live, without resistance, in a beautiful blissful silence.  

It is our own insistence on resisting the flow that creates the noise in our lives.  The cacophony of problems, the worries about our future.  Our fear of death.  Our missing out on the small beautiful things that are actually the big things.  

The bigger our ego, the more we insist that we can control everything, the more we resist reality, the higher the force of the  pschyo-spiritual wind that pushes back against us.  

The reality of a human life is that the pressure will build and build  to a hurricane-like force until something breaks and we experience burnout, disease, death of a loved one, financial troubles, or any of the other suffering that humans have experienced throughout the ages.  

We pretend that change is not happening, and, when we suffer, we dream of a divine life after death instead of wisely discovering a divine life before death.  

But, no matter how much we resist, we can not stand against the wind for long.  For the universe is nothing but eternal transformation and this wind of change blows strong and, even at our strongest, we cannot hold.  

Our fear causes us to plant a stake in the ground, and try to hold on to something.  But our efforts at permanence, in the egoistic sense,  will fail.  Fortunately there is one way, and only one way, to truly drop the fear, and that is to realize that the wind isn’t our enemy but that we are part of it.  

We are an eddy in this wind.  

We are blessed with eternal awareness of the wind.  

And once we let go, and go with the flow, the wind blows the problems and the worries and the petty little fears away into the ether as we, the eddy, dance with all the other eddies in the the silent lucidity of reality.  

How does one do this?  

I think the resistance stems from our need to be special, our need to be somebody, our need to be important. We all love to stand out in some way.  These are all just forms of denying our mortality.  We have to drop our need to avoid our fear of death and our need to be  more important than others.  They stem from the same place.  Transcending both means deeply accepting both.

At first, we resist the idea that we are just like everyone else that we are all equal eddies in the wind.  But this is our ego trying to retain control.

When we can accept that, in the whole scheme of things, we are all nobodies (or, if you prefer, we are all equal somebodies who will all perish and be forgotten, hence temporary in our current form), when we can truly know that we are not special or above the rest of humanity, then we can truly let go, and merge into the wind, and enjoy floating through the flow as no body and accept the beautiful, silent, simple, relaxed transformation it brings to us, because this flowing wind is not just change, which could be positive, or negative (which is one reason we fear change), but it is transformation, which is growth into something larger and richer.  

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Not long ago, I wrote about this same topic in an extremely short parable - The Parable of the Butterfly.

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