Our porch has four different wind chimes, and today they are all ringing. Sometimes all at once, sometimes they take turns, sometimes just one lone chime. I tried to make a movie of them ringing, but alas I need a videographer. The dried brown leaves from last fall are dancing, running and swirling across the lawn.. My husband’s anemometer is spinning fast, he says the high wind speed is about 15 miles an hour. The clouds are gathering and parting, bringing shadows and light, it’s like a March day - drying up the winter’s moisture, getting the ground ready for planting.
Of course this all reminds me of Spirit, the Hebrew word for wind is ‘ruah’ which also means Spirit or breath, Qi Gong and Yoga are both about breathing - what is that quote ‘where there’s breath there’s hope.’ Something like that.
I like to think of the wind moving things, shaking things up. I had a shake up the other day, I was reading Ken Wilber’s book Integral Meditation: Mindfulness as a Way to Grow Up, Wake Up, and Show Up in your Life, and as usual Ken likes to talk about our stages of growth and development. As I was reading them and feeling pretty smug, he began to talk about how at the Pluralistic Postmodern level we think everyone is the same, and we shouldn’t judge. (Those were the points I could understand.) But being, Ken Wilber he went on about this and that, I think he is some kind of genius. So I said, that’s nice, then I went on Facebook and saw something that I thought was judgmental, oh my, I even wrote something back that contradicted the judgment of the other person and I never comment on things like that. There I was all righteous, the wind was blowing in my direction. Then I went back to reading and Ken said how we who say not to judge, are some of the worst judgers, and we don’t even notice it! Wow, that was very insightful of him. I can’t tell you how many sermons I’ve preached on not judging, but then there I was condemning another person’s opinion. He had a lot more to say about this and I’ll quote him here: “So whether you think all judging is bad, or whether you hold several items in strong judgment, doesn’t really matter, in a sense. By making our present subject object - whatever it is- the new, next higher, more inclusive and more conscious subject and self will naturally emerge. If your present judgments are somehow true and universal and genuinely good, they won’t go anywhere; you’ll become more aware of them, but you won’t change them fundamentally. If, however, there are higher judgments, higher types of judgements or better judgements or more loving and conscious judgments, available anywhere in your system (laid down in the entire human race by millions of years of evolution), then you will start to identity with those - they will become part of your new, higher, more inclusive, more whole, more conscious self and subject. And guess what? This continues straight to God.”
I know he’s hard to understand sometimes, and I haven’t read the whole book yet, but he does make many good points. He believes we can all evolve to higher levels of consciousness and that will help us in our endeavors to be more loving, and isn’t that what the season of Easter is all about, about rebirth, about new opportunities, and of course then to follow that wind or Spirit where it leads.
There is this song from “Seasons of the Spirit” that we taught the children it goes like this:
“The Spirit in me greets the Spirit in you, alleluia. God’s in us and we’re in God, alleluia.” That is very similar to saying Namaste after Yoga practice. And also, ‘my the wind be always at your back!’ So enjoy the winds of April, the winds of change, and keep following the Spirit to higher levels of consciousness.