IDIOT WIND

I am not a good sport about the wind. It has all but ruined so many events over my lifetime. It pricks your skin and swirls up dust and litter, messes with your spirits and, more importantly, your hair—there was not enough Dippity-Do to save my sculpted junior high school hair. All you could ever do in bad wind was to wait it out, preferably inside, and keep it in perspective—it was not a plague of frogs, and it would die down. My  atheist father’s great moral teachings always saw me through bad weather: Don’t be an ass. Make sure everyone eats—family hold back. Find something to read. Go for a hike. Pick up after yourself. This too shall pass, honestly, I promise.

But what Bob Dylan called the  idiot wind shows no signs of dying down. And—this will sound harsher than I mean—Stephen Miller is a one-man plague of frogs. Some days the wind from the White House feels like it will blow away everything good and beautiful and legal, while sucking in obscene amounts of cash. Ka-Ching.

Yet maybe this torrential wind holds some answers and hope for us, gobsmacked though we may be as passengers in a bus driven by a convicted sexual abuser and freelance traitor.

We all have memories of events that the wind seemed to ruin, making a mockery of our best efforts to dazzle and manage. But maybe at some point we noticed the fancy napkins flying about like paper airplanes, and just had to shake our heads at the whole ridiculousness of even trying, another performance of the theatre of the absurd everywhere  you looked, and maybe a tiny oblique Mona Lisa smile crossed your lips. And that, my friends, can be a miracle.

A wind moves things around. Seeds would not get scattered without wind’s blowhard ways: There would be so much less beauty and surprise. And exploration—Kon-Tiki, Magellan. The wind gives us fresh air. The wind is the breath of the universe.

We’ve come through such harsh and bitter winds before and we will again, if we stick together and don’t give up. It is tempting to stay inside until it passes, but we need you. You, me, we the people. I love something Frederick Buechner wrote, “Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you."

We need you to raise a little money for the ACLU, to rally the troops for the next No Kings rally. We need you to send off anything you can manage to election integrity foundations and the National Immigration Rights Organization and Journalists Without Borders. We need you to pick up littler in your town and to help get food to the poor. These actions will make you happier and more hopeful than you would have thought possible.

We need voices raised in laughter so quislings in the White House will hear us. Nothing makes narcissists crazier than to be mocked. The Reflecting Pool is my main source of happiness these days, all those magical stingray shapes of American Flag Blue floating to the carpet of green algae on the surface, because someone ingeniously cut a 350 foot slit in it.

As the winds blow around us, we have got to help each other stay focused. Not obsessed, but paying attention. It connects us to spirit and humanity and reality. There is a lot of hopeful stuff going on in America’s reality these days—the polls, the courts, the rising disgust towards John Roberts’ Dred Scott court. Oh, and the collapse of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base, almost as fun as the Reflecting Pool. Those big babies!  Such fairweather fanatics. A few tiny snafus of his part—economic collapse, skyrocking inflation, pointless foreign wars, surrender to the Iranians—and boo hoo, the sycophants peel away.

Yes, the howl and bluster throw us off balance and prick our skin, and some days we can’t remember what to do. So, we ask around. The whole system works because we are not all nuts on the same day. My Jesuit friend Tom Weston always repeats, when I call him on terrible days, “We do what’s possible.” That means practical, simple, and kind. Those actions will save us. Decency is a windbreaker.

You don't mind the wind quite so much when you’re old, or at least you resist it less. Zen thinking is old age: Wow, we have a lot of wind today. You know that it all just comes know. Sigh: It all just comes. Secret of life. When  you're younger, you would like reality to be better than it is, but you learn to more-or-less accept whatever's coming.It takes so much less energy, and it leads to a little gratitude.

Look at flowers the next time you’re in an idiot wind. Of course, look at flowers as many times a day as you can, but even tossed about in the wind, flowers are saying, We’re air, we're breath, we're light, we float, even though we have roots. When the wind dies down—and, note to self, the wind always dies down—the flowers bow to each other.