Dancing with the Wind

My forest is thousands of miles away now, I'm camping on the west coast of Scotland. The green-brown mountains of the Highlands plummet into the grey-blue sea all around me. Their knobby backs hunched up out of the water as if frozen in mid dive trying to get back to the sea floor. Adorned with bracken and heather they frame the pebble beach, this edge I find myself dancing today.

Earlier today I tried to imagine the bodies of these mountains below the surface of the water, pushing up from the depths, and what it all might have looked like before the flood when my ancestors could walk between the islands. Noticing the low points, including where I stand, I stretched my imagination forward to generations from now when this too is covered by the sea. I wondered if I can implant a memory of myself here on this rock so that our descendants can imagine me here on the sea floor.

Now the darkness has wrapped around us, the westerly wind picked up, and I've retreated into the shelter of a flimsy tent. In the liminal space between sleep and wake the two layers of the tend flap wildly against each other sending my mind out to some unknown sail boat caught out there, trying to get home, thrown around in the swirling wind, powerless against the seeming rage of the sea.

Unable to fathom the collective grief of all those lost on nights like these my mind leaps to the shore line, to skin huts huddled behind trees, tethered down with rocks in an attempt to stop the wind sneaking up and whipping the roof off an already damp family. I imagine them smothering the fire to keep the smoke from swirling around into their eyes, acrid tasting in the throat. Dark now, the rain beating relentlessly on the thin roof while the wall of wind pushes like some monstrous hand on the west side of the shelter.

The tent succumbs to the battering, collapsing on my face. A surge of panic sends me upright both hands pushing against the thing designed to shelter me that now threatens to smoother me. The irony strikes me. The things we hide behind can turn into prisons if we let them become hardened. Fortunately, by the grace of springy, bungee cord the tent pops back up to give me some breathing room. I wonder about the family in the skin hut held by sticks, hoping they used hazel or willow for some give.

This happens repeatedly as the heart of the storm passes over. Now I'm enjoying it! Dancing with this huge force moving across sea and land. I imagine one of its fingers keeps reaching down to play with my tent, to acknowledge my tiny presence here, to illuminate what is possible when I allow myself to be springy like bungee cord.

Where in your life can you be more springy, letting the greater forces dance with you?