PlazaJen: Passion Knit

...if you consider the Mississippi River one of the coasts. (name that movie!)

Standing outside tonight, I was reminded of a time a therapist asked me what I believed in. What :could: I believe in. The answer I gave her was, "The wind." For me, the wind is symbolic of a force you can't see, you can't take a picture of it, you can't follow it, per se, and it changes the landscape wherever it goes.

I know what it's like to stand on the edge of a beach, the roar of the water, the horizon and sky disappearing and merging together, and certainly those places make one feel small in relationship to the world around you.

That same feeling is right in my driveway on evenings like this, all the trees around me bare, waving their branches and gyrating against the deepening blue of the night sky. The rushing noise of the wind surrounding me, dry crunchy leaves swirling and leaping while the next gust built force and then poured in around me, as big as a wave. I turned my face to the wind, coming from the south and the west, and saw the first star of the night. I thought about how we humans consider ourselves at the top of the heap, but in that moment I was as inconsequential and small to the wind as one of the oak leaves at my feet.

There's something beautiful about living near the plains; we know it's not fancy or glamorous, and the only ships we have are oversized SUVs and semis hauling ass on the interstate. I've even seen a tumbleweed or two zip across the road out on the highway. But we got wind, baby, we got biiiig wind. And there are three things that get me wistful, philosophical & filled with the world around me: a landscape blanketed in snow at twilight, the smell of an Iowa corn field in the heat of summer, and big wind through the night sky.