The Origins of Wind

I woke up just before dawn, stretched, and went for a brief jog that cut straight through downtown and then looped back to my apartment. I haven’t done much jogging the past few weeks; after a few half-marathons, I decided to spend November doing other exercises and activities. You can overdo anything, after all.

The weather forecast never indicated rain, though the skies were gaunt and the air had the metallic scent of an impending storm. Puddles blotched the streets from rainfall the night before.

A torrential downpour of rain slammed down on me shortly after I crossed the St Louis Arch. Gusts of wind gained intensity and lashed rain against my face. The wind, in my imagination, seemed capable of leveling each building and tree, and finally rendering downtown a pile of rubble.

Finally, I arrived back at my apartment, totally drenched.

I thought about when I was young and I always wondered if wind had an origin. In my mind, there was some faraway land, owned by wind’s creator, initiating these gusts and storms. Or did wind just appear out of thin air?

Obviously there is a scientific explanation for wind, but some things in life are best left a mystery. The unknown opens the imagination, whereas explanations kill it.

The rain stopped about as abruptly as it arrived. There was something other-worldly about it.

The escapist in me looks for these “other-worldly” signs. The day before, I crossed a rest station on the Riverfront Trail, and it reminded me of a train station. Suddenly I imagined the train station from Spirited Away that Chahiro took to visit the witch’s twin sister. It was the same train station occupied by various spirits, navigating a strange purgatorial world.

Would I take this haunted train, and would it take me on some fantastic adventure, away from the consumerism and hustle culture that seem to prevail in the city?

Spirited Away is an amazing movie. Who were these spirits, and where were they going? Brilliantly, the movie doesn’t tell us much. Like the origins of wind, it’s best left a mystery.