What do you hear when you listen to the wind?

I listen
to the wind
and wonder about the future

^{Windy Day, from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai}

I was laying at night with the balcony door open. The wind was whipping something fierce. It is starting to get a little cool at night, but it still felt good for now so it stayed open. I could still hear the night insects, but they were much fewer than usual and were being drowned out by the wind.

As I lay there listening to it, I wondered what it was telling me. Long ago when I was in high school, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There is a line in there where the author, Robert Pirsig, claims that the ancient Greeks listened to the wind to predict the future.

I looked up the line. Here it is plus a little extra for context:

“The ancient Greeks,” I say, “who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?”

DeWeese squints. “How could they tell the future from the wind?”

“I don’t know, maybe the same way a painter can tell the future of his painting by staring at the canvas. Our whole system of knowledge stems from their results. We’ve yet to understand the methods that produced these results.”

The book is basically a summation of the author's attempt to unite Eastern and Western philosophy; maybe you can see hints of that in the quoted passage. There are some interesting ideas in the book (and the sequel) if you are in the mood.

The author was a very intelligent guy, with an IQ of 170, so I might assume his fact was right, but I don't know. The Greeks did have a lot of strange ways of predicting the future. There was aeromancy—observing the air and atmospheric conditions to predict future events— and augury, which involved interpreting the flight of birds. Either of those might involve the wind.

Anyway, whether true or not, that line has stuck with me in the years since reading the book. And it came to me as I listened to the wind blowing past the balcony door.

Did the wind give me any good answers? I can't say; I fell asleep shortly after writing down the haiku.

【Also published on my website】

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.