Full Moon Root: The Nature Of Wind

"I am Fire-fretted and I Flirt With Wind ..."

Deepening into the earth ... let's see what emerges! Here's the first root of the Tree Letter!

The Nature Of Wind

The above image is inspired by a dream I had a week or so ago. Before I went to sleep I asked the Dreaming for an insight as to the nature of Wind. A beautiful dream unfolds, in which I see a fragment of an Old English riddle flitting between the trees of a woodland gallery (which, as in the way of dreams, is an art gallery). The riddle begins (in one translation) "I am fire-fretted and I flirt with wind."

Below are the Old English words of the poem. I created the image above to show the first line (in O.E.) flitting through the trees. It seemed to me that somehow I had indeed witnessed the nature of Wind: a riddle, certainly, darting through the trees as an essence-of-the world language. Something I could come to know, after a fashion: a way of seeing, a way of listening, a manner of speech .... a cause and effect, both visible and invisible, on all things. The riddle itself voices the nature of a very different element, and so I am tantalized by the notion revealed in this dream: that the nature of wind is often revealed by the interplay of itself with something more tactile, some other form, something solid, that we can "more readily grasp", so to speak!

Riddle 30

Ic eom legbysig, lace mid winde,
bewunden mid wuldre, wedre gesomnad,
fus forðweges, fyre gebysgad,
bearu blowende, byrnende gled.

Ful oft mec gesiþas sendað æfter hondum,
þæt mec weras ond wif wlonce cyssað.
þonne ic mec onhæbbe, ond hi onhnigaþ to me
monige mid miltse, þær ic monnum sceal
ycan upcyme eadignesse.
I am sun-struck, rapt with flame,


Here is a
translation