My Windy Tales

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...

I once drove out to the plains, past the city limits, during a blizzard. I stopped my car where the paved road dead ended into a vacant lot, getting out and watching the wind. It made the strangest effect on the world. Every particle that made up the landscape, those of the air, the clouds, the snow, was in uniform motion. A current ripped through all strata, dissolving every layer until there was no differentiation between it. The world was astir, every particle made to mix and mingle in a wild chaos, with the sky, the horizon, the ground, the snow, all turned into a single uniform mass of turbulent matter. Stirred, the world opens. Chaos creates opportunity. In this passing season, all things are made liquid. With solidity dissolved, the world is opened, all gates and walls made no more. Noise makes a uniform field, a blank slate of formless noise, with which to work our hands upon. Through subtle action, chaos can be made form, and those who venture into the wilderness can return fr...