In previous posts, I've mentioned the Navajo creation song that begins, "It was the wind that gave them life."
It was running through my mind, again, as I pedaled into 30-35KPH gusts to the Rockaways and let the same winds blow me home. And that chant grew even stronger, for me, when I saw the people who'd ventured outside on a chilly, windy but almost hauntingly clear day.
It didn't matter whether those people were families who lived there or were visiting--or whether they were the gnarled old men who seemed to have been deposited there by the tides and abandoned by the currents of time. They all looked as if the wind had somehow shaped them, had somehow given them life: the fact that they were alive and the lives they were living, whether in one of the clapboard houses or amongst the remnants of the boardwalk.
The wind brushed the long fine strands and curls of childrens' hair around their faces, which made them seem even younger and dewier than they were. That same wind turned those children's expressions and words from moments to memories for the parents and grandparents of those children. And the wind stuttered the echo of old men shuffling through sand, across boards and concrete and asphalt broken by the very tides that returned to that very same wind.
And the wind defined my trip, my journey. That is the life it gave me, gave them.
It was running through my mind, again, as I pedaled into 30-35KPH gusts to the Rockaways and let the same winds blow me home. And that chant grew even stronger, for me, when I saw the people who'd ventured outside on a chilly, windy but almost hauntingly clear day.
It didn't matter whether those people were families who lived there or were visiting--or whether they were the gnarled old men who seemed to have been deposited there by the tides and abandoned by the currents of time. They all looked as if the wind had somehow shaped them, had somehow given them life: the fact that they were alive and the lives they were living, whether in one of the clapboard houses or amongst the remnants of the boardwalk.
The wind brushed the long fine strands and curls of childrens' hair around their faces, which made them seem even younger and dewier than they were. That same wind turned those children's expressions and words from moments to memories for the parents and grandparents of those children. And the wind stuttered the echo of old men shuffling through sand, across boards and concrete and asphalt broken by the very tides that returned to that very same wind.
And the wind defined my trip, my journey. That is the life it gave me, gave them.
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