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Wind Calling


by Sheila Luecht


There is a death which takes place each season. One that will never haunt you except in that moment. It is when you realize that something else has ended and something else will begin. We learn this with the seasons. We keep the lesson with us throughout our lives. We share it with our children, with our children's children, with those whose life we touch. It is the knowing. There is change. Always change. Many people do not want change, they do not embrace it, but whether or not they do, whether or not they understand it, it is the one constant of the consciousness, of the planet.

I don't know when I first became aware, but I know it was an awareness of little things, like when the snow melted and flowers bloomed. It marked a change in the air, in the wind, it stretched beyond my own senses and went to the institutions of my association.

If it was cold, I was in school. If it was warm, I was outside, free to be. I learned these so well, these changes for many years. Then I learned that work would take all seasons, that only once in a while would I be free to be. I tried to learn pride and freedom in my work. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes I was not. It was continuous, but sometimes stalled, a juxtaposition of realities, of the life being lived with and without perfection. There was no perfection. Only in the seasons.

Only in the change of what was and what will be. The time of love, of courting, the time of marriage and motherhood, the time of death still with each. Death of the season of youth, of friends, parents, those who were usually older. I passed through seasons of living and gave life and saw death.

I know that my death is real. It will come like all other changes, all other seasons. It is in the wind. Some winds blow strongly and I feel them against my self and others lightly and I notice them pushing leaves on trees. I smell what they bring, those winds.

Listening to old friends speak the same way, the same things tells me they have been dead a long time. They are in their form of living, their self, there is no new season of growth. I witness each of them continue on the same path because it is familiar and there are no ripples in it, it is still the path they know, they own.

I wonder increasingly about the changes in the world, the people who suffer for them, I wonder for the future, for the people, for the planet, and yet while I do so, I am still escaping. I am embracing the changes in me, the changes in my season of life, I do not believe I will witness the good come from all this evil that is being done. I feel that someone else will wrestle with it and come to the place that I came to many years before, the belief of balance, the belief in goodness. 

It is all a cycle, all a cycle of change. We recognize it as Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. If we assign the feelings of confusion, stress, hatred, I give them to Winter and I wait for Spring.

I may not be here for the spring, I understand that, but someone will be and they will recognize it when they see it. They will recognize it because they have fought the winter, as we did so many years before. It will cycle all around for them and be done.

I know this because I believe in justice and spring.
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