The Wind Still Knows Me.

Even now, it remembers who I was before the world got loud. Somewhere in the stillness between gusts, I return to myself.

I never “connected” with the wind until I was in high school.

I remember at a very young age how the wind made me feel.

The first time I remember feeling a connection with the wind was on Christmas vacation with my family.

I was in high school, a freshman I think if I remember right. I stepped outside for the first morning that we were at Disney’s Vero Beach resort.

We had gone with my aunt and she had a little vacation cabin we’d stay in that’s balcony opened straight out to the beach. Absolutely GORGEOUS.

I found this video from the exact cabin actually! Credit to @herewiththeears

I mean look at this, how can you not feel something when the wind is just engulfing you with this view:

I remember stepping out, the sun was so bright that morning and we had been driving all night, getting in pretty late.

When I walked out there in the morning on the balcony it was like for the first time I felt connected to the world on a spiritual level.

I felt the waves move in my heart, the wind breathing and speaking to me, calming me to a point I have yet to feel in anything other than the wind.

When I felt it, I knew. There is so much more to the world than where I am. I may not have fully understood it at the time, but I knew something was there.

The wind still speaks.

Since then I’ve had quite a few times where the wind just stops me dead in my tracks.

It says “hello old friend” in the most silently violent way possible.

I feel every inch of my skin engulfed in the wind and I feel comforted, calm, whole again—at least in that moment of course.

There were times where relationships were hard, jobs were difficult, friendships were fractured, I was making mistake after mistake, and somehow the only thing I felt that listened was that same wind.

When it left.

For a while I think I stopped listening to the wind. I would feel those moments but think, “it’s just the wind, let that kid go.”

I thought at one point my connection with the wind had dissapeared, and it was too late to have that again. Almost as if I had fallen for the belief that it was immature to think it could help in healing.

Oh how wrong I was.

It persisted. It continued to comfort me in different moments (…because it’s the wind, of course its always there!) and so I had no choice but to start listening again.

Now when I sit with my daughter in the yard, we feel the wind pick up and we laugh and breathe, looking at the clouds, picking dandelions, and feeling the grass in our feet.

My wife and daughter play with bubbles as I watch the wind carry our worries to the sky and pop away in the distance.

There has been healing in visualizing that.

I am in a healthier place, and yet the wind persists.

I now listen and feel the wind. I breathe in sync with the wind to connect with the world.

Not everyone is spiritual, but I pray to God in those moments, listening to his peace in nature through it.

I believe we are all connected to the Earth, I see it as a gift we are all able to tap into.

A constant reminder that no matter how we feel, the world moves on. So this internal battle of being so worried is actually a choice of whether to sit and ponder those worries (if they are worth my time in the first place) or let them go with the wind.

What it’s taught me.

Most importantly the wind has taught me one of the most important things I could ever learn in life:

The wind reminds me that the energy I am seeking is already around me.

So please go with the wind—the next time you notice a strong gust or a tree bending in the breeze just go live in it, even if just for a few seconds.

I have lived in the wind in small moments like stopping for groceries, loading my kiddo into the car on the way to the family party, or just walking out of a restaurant on a calmer night and feeling the cool wind on my slightly more swollen face.

Even when I feel that I don’t know myself, the wind still knows me.

It is amazing when you take those moments of calm how they not only affect your day but your entire life as a whole.

You start to appreciate smaller moments more, you start to slow down and look, listen, and live.

So as I said before, remember that the energy you seek may already be around you, you just have to listen to find it.