Wind and Whimsy

It’s an ominous symptom from a blogging-post point of view. I look at a list of potential topics I have been exploring–some of which are supported by a list of a few pertinent links. Some, like “synthetic biology” and “transhuman super-intelligence” have dozens each, massive topics to be sure.

Nah. Too arcane, too complex for the typical blog-reader 30 second hop. So all I seem to be able to do is stare out the window at wind playing with bare branches–all that the season has left for the wind to sign its signature in the cold air.

It agitates the butterfly bush canes, whipping them up against the house just below the window at arm’s length from my keyboard. The bare branches transmogrify briefly to privet switches once self-collected for my own punishment.  A sudden spanking of canes against the siding snaps me back into the now.

Just across the lane, those same invisible eddies gently ricochet off the unyielding walls to sway the lithe limbs of spreading maples, our summer salvation from the heat. But the maples here in the shelter of the valley are not a true gauge of the power of last night’s howling.

If I lean a bit right for the longer view I can watch the turbulent treetops of the far ridge, maybe a quarter mile away and two hundred feet higher than where I sit. This is stage where the winds we heard all night are making most of their music.

Silhouetted against  peach-and-sapphire sunrise, mature oaks and poplars do battle, push and shove, back and forth, force against force; wind against wood, both sides powerful and worthy of awe in a daydream over coffee.

The muscle of wood is borne in bones of lignin, root to trunk. When wind-swayed off-balance each bole rebounds with a resilient force equal to the power of the wind. The wind, borne of sun, sent swirling by a spinning planet, by the sagging weight of a continental bubble of air, slips east and south, a map of imaginary blue arrows not visible in the sky overhead to mark its arrival over Goose Creek.

The bark skin of each red oak above Nameless Creek is where biology confronts meteorology, gust upon gust, until the wind blows itself out or moves along east, the tree stronger for each of these howling night dramas of push coming to shove in the cold dark.

http://earth.nullschool.net/

Wind Map http://hint.fm/wind/

Intellicast – http://www.intellicast.com/National/Wind/Current.aspx