No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.
It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can, I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.
But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.
And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.
So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.
A. A. Milne, Wind On The Hill
Occasionally, I stand listening to the night before entering my car to begin my morning commute. I am fully aware that much of what goes on around the Farm occurs outside the scope of human ken, but I find evidence of such activity in the glimmerings, the tiny rustlings, and the faint impressions engendered by the deepest darkness that occurs just before dawn. When I pause in this manner, it is because a presence has somehow registered and weighed upon my senses, a seemingly sentient something quickened by the night and existing, maddeningly, just beyond the outermost edge of my cognition.
Whatever it is, it never seems unfriendly. It is a spirit of some sort. To my modern sensibilities, it seems as if it might be the shade of a being formerly worshipped by our ancestors, a mere wraith who has somehow found its way to the Farm in hopes of becoming the object of simple acknowledgment or, perhaps given time, even renewed worship. But since I have been rendered powerless to grant it divinity due to the skepticism of our age, I am reduced to thinking only welcoming thoughts whenever its presence becomes palpable enough to draw my attention.
This morning the wraith, for once, was strikingly evident for it was possessed of oratory – speech made manifest by the interaction between a vigorous Autumn wind and our many pines. I am as certain as I can be that its intended message was grand in scope, for the resultant soughing of the pines was simply too musical, too magnificent to have been mere mumbling or a verbalization of an incoherent rage over an inability to communicate more directly.
Whatever the wraith’s message may have been, its grandiloquence held me spellbound for several minutes there in the swaddling darkness just outside my door; there in the thin zone of permeability between the wraith’s world and mine.
I didn’t even notice the rain.
