The Warm Wind

Wake-up feel: 7.

Up and out early. A warm wind at the door and no light but the moon's. The valley still dark, the spruce line black against it. The stream that is always there under everything — gone tonight, taken by the wind. The first night past the half — the crescent has arrived, standing over the eastern ridge in a sky almost without cloud, so clear the stars stood close around it. Circled — glorifying it, or guarding it.

Once the sun began to light the day — the pathway up the mountain.

West wind, I ask. Or south-west — coming down off the high pastures, not up the valley from the river. It began late yesterday afternoon, toward evening, and did not stop all night. Warm on the skin, and comforting — not the word I expected for a wind in September in these mountains.

Yesterday morning the bees were loud, buzzing hard at whatever nectar is left. Through the day the wasps flew differently — no line to their flight, circling, looking for what they could take. Then the wind. As if the bees and the wasps had known it was coming before I did.

The pastures on the slope are almost without flower now. The thistles have gone white, the heads open and loosening, the down lifting off the stems and going where the wind takes it — across the meadow, over the fence, up toward the forest edge. The plants are letting go of their seed.

Coming back down the path — the clouds, from the west, pushed ahead of the wind. So: west.

I am trying to be present — the road, the wind, the dark. My thoughts keep walking off ahead of me up the path to the question of what if. I do not follow. They come back on their own, and go again.

The old ones of the valley read stars close about the moon as wind coming. The old ones who set the moon against seed and soil call this a root day — the third running, and the first whole day of the moon's descent; on the old moon, the valley says, you dig what grows below and it keeps through the winter. In these mountains the herding people say that what falls now falls to the root, that seed let go under a falling light takes hold below where the eye can see. The herds are still on the high pastures, but the descent is nearer than the ascent, and the wind that came down last night came from where they are. The bees at the last nectar, the wasps without a line, the down on the wind — the lens reads it as one movement, downward, toward what holds.

The wind is still blowing.

Day 77
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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