When the spring comes, with its new life and sunlight and warm breezes, I constantly find myself studying families having to do with wind.
The East Wind in particular, has quite a notorious history. P.L.Travers brought us Mary Poppins via the East Wind. Sherlock Holmes notes the easterly wind to Watson on the eve of the Great War. Dickens and Tolkien both regard wind from the east as foreboding or as having malintent.
In Greek mythology, the wind from the east was named Eurus or Euros. Often turbulent and naufragous, this member of the anemoi was sometimes also associated with warm weather and rain. This spring has entered lamb like and I can’t help but think of the aurora that the east brings as well as the breeze. Earlier sunrises give light to bulbs denying the cold and mornings that offer the hope of a beautiful day to come. <Anemoi> lives in a family denoting not just wind, but breath and spirit. The animation of spring is evident in the colors, the nidification, and indeed the twirling dances of fallen petals, curling around my ankles as I write this. The magnanimity of the East Wind, though perhaps only fiction, still carries with it the story of what was and what’s still to come.
Today a 6th grade student and I studied this <anim> family. “What does it mean to be an animal?” I asked her.
“Maybe, something that’s alive?” she mused.
“Alive! Sure! What does it mean to be alive?” She smiled and sighed, knowing me well enough to know that there’s always another question laying in wait.
“Ok. I don’t know. Breathing?”
Ah yes. And here we have found something toothsome. Something solid we can pin to and build with. “Breath”, and with it, “Spirit”. We can now discuss bravery and cowardice, <magnanimity> and <pusillanimity>, and how <animators> “breathe” life into their characters. And we can imagine the wind as the heavy breath of a God. We watch an anemometer spin and she laughs while I make the motion of sea anemones as if caught in an underwater breeze. I tell her I want to plant some anemones in my garden.
Like the tulips and narcissus blossoming in my yard, I feel awakened. The warm breeze brings a sense of recrudescence, fresh and raw. Spring has breathed life back into us, and blown away the staleness of winter. Eurus, naughty or nice, is a welcome visitor here, whether or not he carries in a nanny with a parrot topped umbrella.
