since moving here, i've noticed that people in these beach cities are a bit preoccupied with weather vanes...where back in new jersey these, serving both scientific and artistic functions, are typically reserved for the handful of quaint old barns and farmhouses nestled into the once-open rolling hills of a present-day housing development complete with golf course, here these trackers of the wind's whimsy are decorative elements on nearly every third or so home...those i've included in the photos above and directly below follow the most common trend of the nautical theme...a whale's nose or a swordfish tale pointing out the source and the course of the current breeze...
but this one here is a favorite of mine...a desert scene, complete with the sombrero-sporting, guitar-strumming caballero and some coyotes...
with the winds that are characterizing these recent days at the seashore, and inland as well, as blustery ones, i've been thinking about the wind's power, literally so of course, but also of the way in which it serves to indicate, metaphorically speaking, direction and the mapping of the future and its course...the phrase "the winds of change" holds within its meaning a connection between humans and the elemental...our destinies tied up with these cosmic forces...the markers on the weather vane spin, a recognition of a shift from east to west, or vice versa, or to the north or to the south... bringing us perhaps a complete one-hundred and eighty degrees from where we began that very same morning.
it's easy to imagine, maybe comforting even, that one's fate is determined by the winds, even by that measured by a wrought iron sea creature...it makes an allowance for the blaming of circumstance for any given outcome and lifts the sometimes staggering weight of individual responsibility...but what if one chooses not to be moved by the wind, not to take the direction upon which it decides and instead, charts one's own course in spite of the challenge that comes with this conviction...
i include today a poem by ella wheeler wilcox that expresses just this possibility, but at nautical fact...
THE WINDS OF FATE
one ship drives east and another drives west
with the selfsame winds that blow
'tis he set of the sails
and not of the gales
which tells us the way to go.
like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate,
as we voyage along through life;
'tis the set of a soul
that decides the goal,
and not the calm or the strife.
~
how empowering a concept! to imagine that circumstance, as something external, does not write one's story, and that everything one needs in order to follow one's heart is to believe in and listen to that "selfsame" unique and individual heart.
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