Wind in the Element of Wood
Embracing Change and Creative Growth in Late Spring
Here in the late spring cycle and the final unfolding of the WOOD phase, we awaken the beauty, majesty and rushing of the Wind as it calls seasons change and moves us closer to FIRE’s lofty throne. These last weeks of WOOD have us merging with FIRE, wind and heat, eddied, swirling and ambient. Pushing us to cast our eyes across Heaven, range among the gods, and fall to our knees with the beauty and majesty of it all.
This is FIRE calling Heaven to Earth
Harnessing Wind’s Energy for Creative Growth
Our benefactor in this time of change is Wind. Wind sings its songs to stir and uplift simultaneously, breaking us from our meditation as it fans the embers of our hearth. Its quick rushing has no 5-year plan for where it will range or what will bow in its path, passing over Kings and blades and of grass with equal intention. To lean into Wind’s broad free spirit and receive its medicine is to pay absolute attention to its every gust and flurry as if each were a coded message from the future.
Have you ever ridden the warm updrafts with a kite and felt the mastery of the force of wind through its string?
Cultivating Kites listening, and gentle influence is how we balance the energies in the Yang phase. It is the application of the feminine intuitive principle in the rising tide of the masculine cycle of knowledge and reason. It is a reminder to slow down, to cool, to read what cannot be seen, and so to pull out the innate value of each experience as a signpost to our next best steps.
Kite as a Metaphor: Navigating Life's Winds
We launch a kite by first feeling for the Wind, by testing it, assessing its strength and direction, and orienting ourselves accordingly. We read the environment through a felt sense of it before we unleash the kite in small string increments towards the sky. Each tiny advancement unleashes a thousand reassessments of timing, placement and alignment. In this way, the wind shows us the power of the minutiae that surrounds us. Mastery and greatness don't come from aligning with life’s milestone moments, but by holding them in vision only as we skillfully navigate the tiny fragments that make them up.
Here in late spring, we have shed the husk of winter’s seed, but not yet bloomed anew. We are still fresh and young, but also vulnerable in our newness and at our most tender. From this place, we are encouraged to be humble like the student who bows to the master. Heart and mind open and grateful for what may be learned to help us along the path of evolution and growth.
To learn from Wind is to name and know the delight of laughing and plunging into the ocean with friends, of planting a tree, or accidentally catching the moonrise. It is listening to the intuitive message that says ‘Go, the timing is right”. It is the Grace of things flowing and coming into alignment without effort, and it is our essential nature.
Through winds lift the kite teaches us how to be both adaptable and creative in the play of force. It demonstrates responsive beauty and malleable strength as it reads the lift and drag, leaning in to dive, turn and rise as its run exceeds its weight and it touches heaven. Navigating not by brutality or determination but by leaning into every nuance of its environment, and choosing to be creative with all that it finds. Knowing this as the step-by-step process that builds great things.
Yielding to the Moment: Learning and Lessons
We can viscerally experience the power of lifes coded increments as we mature to become both kite and anchor. Capable of being the caretaker of many strings that together create beautiful things large and small in life's ever-changing current. Transforming each gusty, destabilising conflict into a creative tension to be yielded to and unfolded moment by moment.
Like raising wonderful humans, training a pet, or creating a work of art, it's a bit-by-bit experience to which we capitulate when needed, re-direct as required, and re-tension until something spectacular Becomes. It is one story read at night to your child again and again over the course of childhood that creates the magic of storytelling. It is one lovingly homemade school lunch among the thousands you make that describes the force of the love you have. There is enormous power and endurance in each small expression of life and the last phase of WOOD calls you to that power as the emergent point of the future fruit, and the seeds of our own next stage of life.
Our work is to yield to the conditions around us as guide and mentor, seeing each obstacle as a tangible vehicle that allows us to understand how we can become free. To engage the energy of life productively by combining the power to create with an openness that believes anything is possible.
