The Kingdom of Wind

Greetings from the Kingdom of Wind…

Where gulls are thrown across the sky like kites without strings, exultant in surrender, and witches on bikes are blown sideways, holding steady on their course to the tip of the island where seals keep the lost dreams of humans safe.

How do we lose a dream? Or should why be the question? I generally don’t remember my dreams, something which used to trouble me, especially when I heard the detailed visions some of my friends receive while asleep. Always comparing myself to someone else, I thought there was something wrong with me until I acknowledged I receive visions through my hands, the ones typing these words on this keyboard, and they don’t sound like the Delphic oracle. They sound like me speaking in my regular east coast American voice, talking a little too fast, jumping ahead and having to circle back to see if you get it. I don’t see the visions with my eyes, inner or outer, my hands see them for me. My task—my gift—is to allow my hands to receive and express them.

Sometimes I express them in words, other times in touch, others in what some would call gestures, but I call being danced by the stream, by the waves, by the southwest wind breathing softly on the island, the southwest where dwells Kautantowwit, who sends us beans and corn, and the summer breeze that carries the fragrance of beach roses through our open windows to anoint our sleep with the fragrance of the goddess, womb-dark memories passed down through bloodlines that travel across oceans on ships that may have unknowingly followed hidden currents of energy deep beneath the seafloor.

My ancestors came to this land as takers because someone had taken from them. They followed a dream, perhaps motivated by great danger or starvation, and participated , in the genocide and near cultural eradication of the indigenous people of Turtle Island just by taking up space, even if they weren’t murderers. There is nothing I can do to change that. It is in archived in history, and I don’t want to change it, because I’m not here to change the past, I’m here to participate in the dreaming of the future, which for me means being present enough to slip outside of time and make contact with the mythic right beneath my feet.

I detailed an experience of this attempt in Piko, successfully I would say. If you’ve read the book let me know if you agree. But in truth, the circumstances surrounding the attempt recounted in the book were much easier than the life I’m returning to when I leave Block Island in a few days. During the genesis of Piko I was work-trading for rent at a pretty easy job that allowed me to be on my own schedule, receiving boosted unemployment due to Covid, and was living on a tranquil farm with rules about sound pollution ten minutes from one of the most sacred and beautiful spots on Moku o Keawe.

Being back on Block Island has made me realize the underlayer of why I am not happy living in Kona, in the Palisades neighborhood up above the airport, a convenient 15 minute drive from my job in Kona Town, right on the tourist strip of Ali’i Drive. I am not moving though my day in touch with mythic ground. It’s still there. My feet are just not able to feel them through pavement and the distraction of the tourist hullabaloo. I have forgotten my dream.

Which circles me back to the second question—why? Easy to answer—so I can remember. So I can up-level my ability to be in contact with the mythic, carry my contact with the goddess in the way my hips sway, let the gleam of trickster shine through my eyes, channel the voice of the stream in all my conversations, and the ocean in my touch on the massage table in order to channel the voice of the water where it’s most needed. Someone needs to be willing to slip through the cracks in the pavement and nourish the soil beneath.

Still, this is a position of sacrifice. Am I truly willing to make it, or am I doing it grudgingly, settling for something I don’t want because my dream seems impossibly out of reach?

The answer to that is a clear yes. I also hear a voice telling me I don’t even know what my dreams are because I’ve allowed material circumstances to block me from hearing them. No wonder I don’t remember my dreams.

So here is one dream I do know, revealed on the computer screen for all to see. I want to host wilderness/wildness rites of passage on Block Island on my own land, to invite people from all over the world to come here and learn from this land the way that I did over my years living hear year round. If you know anything about Block Island real estate you’ll know how laughable this sounds for someone with my income level, but I refuse to let that limit me from expressing the dream out loud. Laugh or scoff at me, it’s ok. Doubt it will happen. That’s ok, too. The seed is in the wind and I will follow it to wherever it lands and roots. My body and soul longs for Manisses, but I will accept going where I’m most needed as long as it’s in conscious participation. No more unconscious sacrifice.

In the beginning, we were all indigenous.

Now is the time to remember that. Stop taking others’ native ground and find your own. Allow yourself to be claimed by the soil beneath you, even if it’s covered by concrete and seems crushed by ten thousand tons of steel.

I am in love with two islands. Right now, my lover is Block Island. I shall be returning next week to my other love, Moku o Keawe, the Big Island. It took me a long time for me to realize they have the same initials—BI. Be I. Bee Eye. Bee I. Be Eye.

In seeing myself, I blossom and become nectar. I become food for others. That is what both of these islands have given me, one through the power of wind, the other through earth. Water is the common element, softening the land in waves formed by winds far out to sea.

Science says waves are formed by wind, gravitational forces, and underwater disturbances, wind being the most common.

Wind, science says, is causes by fluctuations in temperature and pressure systems.

But in the far north, the lands where the Inuit and Yupik hunt reindeer, seals, and caribou, where the white bear claws the ice and people can still see the clear path to our ancestral homeland in the Milky Way, they say the wind came to Earth when a wife without children asked her husband to go out on the tundra in search of a solitary tree. “Go and bring back a piece of the trunk and make a doll from it,” she told the man. “Then it will seem like we have children.”

The husband did as his wife asked, following a long track of bright light deep into the tundra. It was the Milky Way. He traveled far from the house where his wife waited until he saw a beautiful object before him. Coming close, he saw it was the solitary tree. Because it was small, he didn’t take too much, cutting off only a small portion of the trunk, and carrying the fragment home.

When he reached home, he entered the house and began to carve the image of a small boy. His wife made two suits of clothing for the doll, dressing him in one and saving the other for when the other got dirty.

“Father,” she called her husband for the first time, “Make our little boy a set of toy dishes.”

“Why should I do that?” the husband asked, still unsure of his new role. “We’ll be no better off.” He was a good husband, a provider. He’d wasted enough time carving a doll, now his wife wanted him to carve toy dishes?

His wife disagreed. “We already are better off. We had nothing to talk about except ourselves before we had the doll.”

The husband saw the logic of that and made the toy dishes. When he was done, they sat the doll in the place of honor on a bench opposite the door with dishes full of food and water before it.

The room was very dark when they went to bed. Together they snuggled under sealskins, listening to the quiet.

Ooooo ooooo ooooo….What was that? Low, whistling sounds startled them both awake.

“It’s the doll!” the wife said, shaking her husband fully awake.

Throwing off their sleeping skins and lighting a lamp, they saw the food and water in front of the doll was gone. In wonder, they looked up and saw the eyes of the doll move. The wife cradled it to her bosom with delight, cooing over it like she would have over her own child. Tired, she finally put it back on the bench and went back to bed to join her sleeping husband.

In the morning, the doll was gone.

They looked all around the house for it, but the doll was nowhere to be found. Outside, a line of tracks led from their doorstep toward the creek. They followed them until they reached the water, walking along the bank until the tracks came to an end. Doll, who now had a name that began with capital letters, had gone up to the Milky Way on the same path of light his father had followed when he’d gone to find the tree.

Doll traveled along the bright path till he came to the edge of day, where the sky comes down to the earth and walls in the light. Close beside him in the east, he saw a skin cover fastened over a hole in the sky wall. The skin was bulging inward as if some strong force on the other side were pushing it.

"It is very quiet here. I think a little wind would make it livelier," said the Doll, drawing his knife and cutting the cover loose on one side of the hole. At once a strong wind blew through, every now and then bringing with it a live reindeer. Looking through the hole, Doll saw beyond the wall another world like the earth. He drew the cover over the hole again.

"Do not blow too hard," he said to the wind. "Sometimes blow hard, sometimes light, and sometimes do not blow at all."

Then he climbed up on the sky wall and walked until until he came to the southeast where he discovered another covered opening bulging inward. When he cut this covering loose a gale swept in bringing reindeer, trees, and bushes. He quickly covered the hole and said to the gale, "You are too strong. Sometimes blow hard, sometimes light, and sometimes do not blow at all. The people on earth will want variety."

Walking on, the sky wall beneath his feet, he came to a hole in the south, and when this covering was cut, a hot wind came rushing in. Rain and sea spray from the great ocean beyond the sky-hole poured through the hole. Doll closed this opening too, and told the south wind same as he’d told the southeast. “Sometimes blow hard, sometimes light, and sometimes do not blow at all. The people on earth will want variety."

Walking into the west, he discovered another hole. Heavy rain storms lashed through, sharp with sleet and stinging spray. When he had closed this and given the wind its instructions he went on to the northwest. There, when he cut away the covering, a cold blast came rushing in, releasing snow and ice that chilled him to the bone. Half-frozen, he managed to close the hole and gave the wind its instructions.

Daring the sky wall again, he headed north, but the cold became so severe he had to circle back to the south or die. He was only able to approach the north when he’d reached the opposite opening. It took great courage to face that bitter cold, but the man did it. He cut the cover and let the north wind in. A blast of snow and ice almost crushed him. When he pushed his way up through the frigid layers, he saw that snow had covered the Earth. When he closed the hole he told the wind to only come in the middle of the winter so the people would have time to prepare for it.

Hastening away down to warmer temperatures in the middle of the earth plain, he looked up and saw that the sky was supported by slender, arched poles reaching toward a point he couldn’t see, and made up of a material unknown to him. They reminded him of the lodge where he’d been born, so he kept on journeying until he reached that place, where his parents were waiting for him.

Doll lived in this village for a long time. When his parents died he was cared for by other villagers, fed and watered and sung to. He lived on for many generations, and when it was his time to die, he was not forgotten. Other parents made dolls for their children in imitation of Doll, who first opened the wind-holes of the sky and regulated the six winds.

Next time the wind falls off and you find yourself in silence, remember him, the doll who became Doll, a fragment of a tree carved with a hunting knife by a good husband on his wife’s instructions. Tell us when you hear the branches creek, when the wind rises. Allow yourself to be released from a branch-tip, a bit of the wind’s dream.

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Is there anything more free than a gull allowing itself to be flung across the sky? Remember that moment when they pivot and slice into the wind with no visible effort, and with another tilt of the wing surrender to the result of fluctuations in temperature and pressure systems, or the breath of the gods, whatever it is, it’s glorious.

What images blow through your dreams, too fast to catch and plant in the ground under your feet? Let’s make the wind our friend. It always shifts and settles. Let’s envision the white-winged milkweed seeds drifting far out to sea without worrying if the ocean will swallow them up, content to drift where they are meant to go because their destiny is to be food for butterflies.

The Kingdom of the Wind cannot be chained, or even embraced. It’s a brush against your cheek, the bat of an eyelid, the smell of salt flung off the tip of a wave.

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And so I will return next week to Kona, friends, to the Kingdom of Water. Until our next exchange, I’m delighted to offer this interview on The Golden Thread Podcast. I really enjoyed my conversation with Marni and am so grateful to be asked on my first podcast!

Piko: A Return to the Dreaming is available through all online platforms and can be ordered through your local bookstore.

If you’ve read the book and want to write a review on Amazon, I would be so grateful. Reviews help get the word out about the book. You don’t need to have purchased the book on Amazon to write a review. You just need an Amazon account.

Here’s a link to do that:

Write a Review on Amazon

Until next time, friends

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light