Day 21 Lenten Meditation: Wind

This is not so much a meditation but a cautionary tale about wanting to wield strength indiscriminately:

Anna raised her arms, stretched out her fingers. The slightest breeze tickled her fingertips and rustled her cloud of fine, frizzy blonde hair. She remembered what the old woman had told her at the market as Anna clutched the basket full of potatoes and leeks. “Your family were weather talents for the Crown way back when,” the woman asked, regarding her with opaque eyes. “The talent died out, or so they say. Nobody knows why.”

Anna reached toward the words, feeling them sing in her chest. Talent, she thought. I could be a talent. Something different, something more. More than the youngest child of a farmer in a small village running errands for her beleaguered mother. Anna ran away from the old woman without bidding her farewell.

She had run straight for the forest with the basket, avoiding her mother, avoiding her house. It was not hers to be the child of a farmer. She knew, she knew in her heart that there was a name for her difference and her destiny now.

And so, she stood in the deepest part of the forest. She imagined the breeze tickling her fingers as she froze in that uncomfortable position, arms outstretched. Minutes later, she felt it – the breeze increased, stirring the leaves around her, making them whisper.

Was it her? She concentrated harder. When she squinted, she could see the invisible currents eddying around her, her own chilling microclimate she was insensate to. She wove the currents, warp and woof, as she had many days at her mother’s loom.  This, this was her destiny, to call the winds up for the King, to live in court, to leave behind her existence on the farm.

The breeze became a torrent of air, tangling her hair and snapping branches. Her vision drilled down to individual particles she could not name. She stirred those particles like a pot on the stove, watching them whirl.

This is mine! She felt the triumphant surge of her heart. Mine and only mine, to smite anyone who would gainsay me!

Her heart felt lighter than air.

Anna’s mother noted her child’s absence as the wind howled. She feared for her daughter, the unbiddable one.

Then she heard the voice in the wind: Mine and only mine, and she thought of her family stories of talent and consequence.

In the morning, Anna’s father found Anna standing upright in the woods, devoid of life. When he touched her shoulder, however, she crumbled into dust as if all its substance had dissolved into air.

He brought the tidings back to his wife with a handful of the dust that had been Anna. His wife merely nodded; she had heard the tales of her family’s wind talent and its price.