When you spend enough time living by large bodies of water, you eventually meet this wind.

It's the kind of wind that begins across the calm surface, hidden away in the carved tree house of the wind people. It has wide wings, this wind, and launches itself out over the railing made smooth by many hot hands. It soars like an owl, silently down the depth of rock and wood, ripped and serrated leaves a mossy green blur in its passing.

A few inches above the water, it pulls back and lets its momentum propel it. It races, its power a wake behind it, its presence a sound wave that rattles the scales from fish. As it goes, it picks up debris, old iron buoys, amputated tree limbs, fisherman mosquitoes out too far too late. And when it reaches the other shore, it slams into the first structure it finds, spreading itself over glass windows and dodging its fingers through cracks of walls.

One by one, its brothers, its cousins follow. Over the railing, down the cliff, across the water, and against the cabin. They roar in coup. They leave the scattered remains of their found treasures on the banks. And as the sun rises, they float their secret canoes back to the tree house to wait for the call again.

Last night, as the night before, I dreamt of ravens. I woke to raven calls, the throaty croak echoing in the rainy morning as I lay in the bath. In my dreams, they wore Raven masks with bristly beards and danced with me, the bonfire licking the tops of the sky behind them. Last night, one of them transformed into a woman and spoke to me about my medicine. Right now, I hear the far away, four-time beckon, a lonely, mystical, ancient saw blade vocal coming from some unseen treetop deep in the impenetrable canvass of cloud and rain.

This porch is old. I lean back against a wood and wicker bench and watch the headlights of distant cars sparkle. The drops plaster the planks, drip lazily from the edges of eaves. In front of me, a single plant waves slowly against the grey backdrop. Inside, they read and they watch, clinging to the last few minutes of connection, to the nourishment of remembrance and quiet, to the sense of completion.

It's easy for me when coming to a place like this to imagine that I live here, to give up every aspect of my life away from it. I wake, eat breakfast at the lodge, settle in for mid-morning to early-afternoon writing, eat lunch, take a hike and talk to nature, return mid-afternoon to read and study, eat dinner, walk back to my room for some late evening entertainment and bed. It's easy to forget the cat and the work, the struggle, the drive and the ferry, all things that as I hand my key over, I have to recognize are also part of my life.

I have found something here in a short period of time that I had lost. But more to the point, I feel that something else has found me. As I ate today, I looked up and realized that a wolf mask had been placed near where I'd eaten each meal, watching over me. Above my bed each night, a hummingbird painting hung, next to it an orca. It seems that every moment there's another medicine teacher appearing if only briefly, allowing me to share the world with it.

Maybe I decided to look up and around me instead of own at my feet or to the ends of my fingers. These things were always, will always be there. There's an arrogance to think they exist from perceiving them or to think they come and go like this rain and this wind. It's us who come and go, in and out of awareness, we the unstable ones, lost easily in the noise and in the distractions we co-create.

The breeze shifts, bringing water onto the porch. The wind plays its games. One duck bobs along the shallows, hoping for confused insects and unmindful fish. Throngs of hunched human shapes duck away from the weather, stomp their feet on the soaked mats. Their hands grasp the handle in a succession of staccato latch releases, all that conversation suddenly loud, suddenly still as the door closes again. Like them, I will eat lunch, only to hoist my backpack to the car afterwards and make my return to the totality of my life.

But as I go, I carry the raven's call and the wolf's watchfulness back home with me, along with a precious piece of my being that I had all but forgotten, in the hopes that I will not forget it this completely again.

(thank you streamsandpools for this opportunity)