My Windy Tales

  The passing phenomena of melt and erosion and tectonic emergence are nothing compared to the eternity of the wind and rain that make it all happen.

  Lying is easy. I used to head out to local stores just to hear the song and dance. I remember walking around the furniture store as every employee side-eyed me for my anachronistic prescence, this strange looking woman in a baseball hat looking at furniture she clearly had no intention of buying. The store was in a beautiful location, on par with the simple brutalism of tech. Snow was blowing outside on that day, under grey skies. Wind nipped at my face as I explored that day, wondering how such exotic imports could find their way to my mid-continental wasteland.

Sun comes up blood red Wind yells among the stone All-all graceful instruments are known.

The forest isn’t a thing unto itself, but simply, the world. We often construct the wilderness as just that, a single noun referring to a location, yet the opposite is true. The forest emerges, the landscape formed by continuous movement of constant natural processes, processes that never stop to rest or cease, today’s landscape being only the passing appearance created by the movement of all things. Those who realize this have a nasty habit of pretending this is unique to “the wilderness” - making the same mistake they began with moving past. Rather, there is nothing “external” or “disconnected” from this. Humans emerged from the same oceanic soup as every other living thing, and their civilization came from their hands and behaviors, no different from a termite mound or beehive. The mistake of much naturalist and environmentalist writing is to externalize the very thing which they study from themselves, to construct nature as something they are not as much a part of as everything els...

They say true art conceals the artist’s hand. This is true of magic as well. Magic is not separate from the world. Magic is a toolkit and a language at once - magic is working with the world. All secular things have magic processes behind them and all magic things have secular processes behind them. The difference is nonexistent. The saint who collects tithes, heals the sick,  gives service to the crowd… all of these acts are one in the same. The saint is manipulating the world, by all means at once. There is no separation between the material and immaterial - to act on both is to perform magic.

In Northern Minnesota, nestled in the crystalline air that blows through waving pines, is a passage of clear water flowing over smoothed rocks. It’s shallow, if one braves the almost spherical forms of the creekbed, one can walk across it, bathe their feet in it. This is nothing special for the area, one of countless little pearls of lakewater dotted about the trees and snow. Yet its waters are a beginning, for as Lake Itasca drains each fractional drop of itself over that rocky precipice, it sets that water tumbling on a journey downriver, to begin what we call, the Mississippi. By the time this water reaches the Atlantic Ocean via the Gulf of Mexico, it’s changed. An entire continent’s worth of dilution and flow has made it fatigued and dirtied, turbid now to blackness and slow to complete stagnancy, it turns into swamp - a putrid petri dish of hypertrophy that makes the border-region between Louisiana and Mississippi. Even further upriver, before it’s slowed to a dead halt, the wate...