The calmness I feel when I hear the murmuring of the wind

There is a sort of stillness with the wind: Not silence, but murmur: an older language than words. I have attempted for many years to understand how it calms me, how it oozes into the creaks of my rest like a balm. Not the wind itself, but of the sound it makes: how it moans over power lines like a half-asleep cello, how it whispers through dry autumn leaves like it is telling a secret, how it whines against windowpanes on cold nights, a lullaby for the solitary.

And I knew it when I was a child: face down in the grass behind our old farmhouse. It was a noisier world back then—crickets chirping, tractors roaring, my dad yelling in to supper—but when the wind blew, all the other noises fell back, took a step away. I recall pushing my ear to the earth and sensing the ground shuddering with tales I had not yet learned. My grandmother told me that the wind carried the voices of those who preceded and loved the soil. "Listen close enough," she winked, "and you'll hear your great-grandpa's laugh." Never let her know I thought she meant it.

Years later, and in the today-justly-numb wake of divorce, I was pacing the same country road at twilight. That farmhouse was vanished and replaced by a subdivision, but that field remained—a recalcitrant relic. Cross-legged on the ground, eyes closed, refusing to cry. And then it arrived: a gust sweeping in over the wide plain, whipping my hair into knots, roaring in my ears with that same old, silent rumble. It didn't fix everything. But I sensed, for the first time in months, that I was grasped. The wind didn't mind my disappointments, my mortgage, or my isolation. It only knew how to keep going, to flex but not fracture, to sing while it moved.

It's an odd kind of reverence my seven-year-old has inherited. On a hike last autumn, she stopped in her tracks, mittened hand clenching mine. "Mama," she breathed, "the trees are applauding." Overhead, a chorus of maple leaves rustled in the wind, dry and golden and completely alive. Remember my grandmother's stories, all those invisible threads binding the generations into being, snapped back to my mind. I realized suddenly how the wind is less a force than a bystander: it has touched each face that ever pointed toward the sky, every cheek that ever colored with sadness or joy.

And so today I leave the window open an inch even when winter is hard outside. Let the curtains slap. Let papers swirl about. The wind is strangely reassuring, the way it insists on not being primped like everything else—control. When the world is simply too harsh, too cacophonous, I step out onto the porch and wait. It always arrives: that gentle breath on my ear, whispering the same lie it whispered to my forebears, my past self, my wide-eyed kid. You're small, you're fleeting, and you're impossibly and endlessly alive.

The quiet I have come to know isn't in quiet. In the letting go, the instant of putting down arms and knowing that the wind has been humming your name all along.