Catching wind: On storms and love

At 4am I awoke with an anxious swirling in my gut… the ceiling canvas straps of our yurt were rhythmically flapping from the gradually intensifying wind. This is not uncommon for where we are located on an exposed plateau above the rio chama dam, and despite knowing that winds never picked up very high this time of year, on this particular morning I was crawling out of my skin and obsessively checking my phone for weather updates. Some dear friends happened to (by some divine fate) be visiting us and were sleeping on the floor in the center of the yurt. I jolted up and started a fire, put my coat on, pissed in a jar near the bed, and at that moment experienced the fiercest pounding of wind to ever hit our home. The walls were reverberating, shaking, and slightly lifting off the platform. Beams began slipping off of the tension cable. Our layers of hand sewed wool and canvas were effortlessly rolling up the ceiling towards the tono (crown). The few beams that fell near my head opened up a channel for the wind to enter swiftly into the yurt. To my dismay this was not only a windstorm but a gust of freezing ice laden earth flying faster than I could have ever anticipated. With haste Blue jumped on our rope hanging from the center of the tono to weigh down the structure, a strategy used by Mongolians in high wind situations. Myself and friends held onto the walls trying to stabilize everything with our bodies as 10 ft long hardwood beams continued falling and furniture, shelves, books, and altars were tipping over and smashing on the ground around us. The wind was so strong that Blue was being swung on the rope like an out of control dowsing rod. “Open sea conditions” our friend Chelsea would later read on her phones weather update that did not reach us in time. Because the yurt was shifting off the platform, the walls tilted so excessively that the door jammed. Our friend Cy punched the window of our door so we could all crawl out to safety. In our chonies completely disoriented, barefoot in a 90 mph blizzard, my hand cut from the broken window glass and bleeding profusely, Blue and I screamed and cried in terror, our hearts bursting with grief as we witnessed our home fracture and nearly fractalize in front of us, the violent whipping wind shredding our belongings. The air was so icy we could barely breathe as we ran to the nearest shelter feeling absolutely helpless and at the mercy of a force so wild and mysterious that time itself collapsed. 

Of course, a storm creates its own story of time. Anyone who has been in a life-threatening wind storm understands the way it both encapsulates and destroys time. Watching infrastructure and material disintegrate in a matter of seconds will change you.Time stretches and slows way down. You become acutely aware of your flesh, your will to live and the love you want to protect. Yes it is a confluence of opposing airs often at the changing of seasons, activated by atmospheric tension and likely complicated by global warming. But to me it is more than conditional technicalities.

A storm is also known as tempestas “a period of time.” It is the whirling song of the Earth and the undeniable will of the sky. It feels like the turbulant breathing of some mighty and magnanimous Gods trying to work something out through their speech. It is holy chaos. Many cultures descended from Indo-European nomadic peoples believed in the majestic winged-ness of wind and it is amazing to me how so many of these same cultures and others around the world have languages that reflect and animate the many personalities of the elements they live with. 

 One example is in the Etymologies of Isadore, published 600-625 AD in Andalusia, where wind is understood to consist of many bodies and up to 12 expressions. All personified by the direction in which they blow from and the other elements with which they interact. They are called by the places they came from and for the qualities they exhibit. Dry, cold, warm, wet, life-giving, hard hitting, uprooting. There are those that dissipate clouds and constrain waters (Aquilo) and those that give life to flowers (Auster). Some are even believed to rise directly from certain constellations, bringing with them the power of that star story. They are Gods, and when exposed to them, they no doubt become a part of us. There is the infamous and fierce “mistral” or Occitanian maestral winds on the Mediterranean coast of France that were named as such to emphasize their position as masterful teachers to the people. I love this reframing of the relationship, and I love to imagine wind bodies being in conversation, collaboration and conflict with each other and with humans.

 While sitting by the fire that morning, skin aching from the icy gales burning my face and feet, not sure if my cat was lost or dead and wondering what the overall damage to our home would be once the storm passed, I couldn’t help but feel the vulnerability of my human-ness. Human-ness that is anchored and defined by the cycles of earth. Human-ness that is anchored by the labour, time, and learning required to build your own home only to watch it collapse in a storm. Human-ness that is anchored in the deep grief and inevitable gratitude that follows.. and in remembering that to live more autonomously on land and in a home that you love with the fullness of your heart, “a home that echoes your own shape and spirit back to you” (Martin Prechtel), means you are living on the edge of what modern civilization deems as normal, comfortable and socially acceptable. Some people in my life seemed un-phased by such a collapse, hinting that although it was a freak storm, it was my choice to live in precarity with the land and so I am suffering the consequences and should just go back to living somewhere “safe” and “normal.” I think it is this mindset that reinforces the Empires scarcity agenda and attempt to keep our lives spiritually shallow.

I realized that these are the types of weather trials our ancestors survived through and were refined by. These were the moments that shaped the way people built and extended their cultures, how they sought community, why they migrated and had superstitions and ritual protocols. Weather is everything. Weather moved people, quite literally.. across rivers, plains, mountains and continents. Weather shaped the designs of our homes, our mythologies, our prayers and the way we planted seeds. Immense and powerful storms not only signal change but demand we both seek and offer support to those in need. They humble us and call us closer to community and our values. They remind us that we are in an unknowable Now. They also remind us that life is all about maintenance. Rebuilding is part of that maintenance, and the stasis of modern comfort is really only obtainable to the class privileged.

I am grateful we got out safely and that we had friends present to support us. Our neighbors 1/2 a mile away who have windbreaks still experienced significant damage to their homes. Across Northern NM, trees fell on cars, trailers flipped and many other houses were destroyed. The crown of our yurt miraculously stood strong and only one of our wall sections needs to be repaired. Neighbors and friends came to help us clean and pack it all up over several days. Although I don’t know where the middle of winter will carry us, everything about this experience brought me back to Love. Not Love by way of pitying myself or others who get impacted by such events, but Love by way of feeling connected to a larger story of human resiliency across time and space. Love by way of acknowledging that I really don’t know shit about the complexities of Earth’s magic and demands for restoration. My prayers are up for the safety of all peoples across the globe navigating climate change and unprecedented shifting weather patterns which will surely continue to shake our foundations. May we all get the resources and care we need to get through.