“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

‘Oh, sweetheart, if only you were here with me to see this,’ I said aloud to Jane. And as I talked to her I suddenly found myself crying for her again there in the semi-dark night while the wind seethed and roared. Deep wrenching sobs began in my legs and stomach and rose up through my chest. I tried to keep talking to her, but could not. ‘It must be better where you are,’ I finally gasped, ‘but you should see this. It’s so wonderful …’ And as I spoke I intuitively understood that the motion of the wind was an excellent creative metaphor for the motion of Jane’s soul, that its cool feel upon my face could be the physical version of her caring for me ‘from where she is.’ The storm of my grief eased after a while, but the wind and the light rain continued. I dozed. When I woke half an hour later the wind had diminished a great deal. I felt drained. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Was Jane’s soul resting from its earlier great commotion, or had she moved away for the moment while exploring other aspects of her new reality that were perhaps out of range to us earthbound creatures? I crawled back into my bag and slept until dawn.

The night was so warm that I unzipped the bag all the way down to my feet. In the half-dark I spoke aloud to my wife, telling her that I wished she was with me. I fell asleep. Around 4:30 A.M. I woke to the sound of a heavy wind and the feel of much colder air creeping in around my body. The wind chimes hanging in a corner of the porch were clashing together repeatedly. I zipped up the bag as spatters of rain began to blow in on me. The woods come down over the crest of the hill in back of the house, to the north, and with a sound like an ocean tide the wind was racing through their treetops, plunging south past the house and into the valley. Jane and I had always loved that great roar. The trees thrashed in my neighbor’s yard across the road. The whole scene was one of change and energy and mystery.

And I often feel this metaphor return as I step out on the back porch of the hill house and listen to the wind in the treetops to the north.

A block to the west of the hill house, the main road drops straight down into the outskirts of Elmira. Opening off the road to the left like a series of steps are short, level sidestreets upon which I often run late at night. In the beginning the running helped me physically handle my grief over Jane’s passing; I cried often as I ran, and tried to comprehend where she is now. I’m a natural runner, but had been unable to do more than a little jogging in recent years because of the pressures of work and of taking care of Jane as she became more and more ill. After her death I could run nightly if I chose to. I find that activity still secret and evocative. The streets are lined with trees arching up to meet overhead; periodically those intersecting patterns of leaves and branches are punctuated by bursts of light from the streetlamps. At certain times the moon follows me along in its phases. The only sounds might be the wind in the treetops and the chug-chug of my shoes on the asphalt. A dog may bark in the distance. When I do it right I float effortlessly along. And amid my tears I finally permitted the obvious to become obvious to me. The following is revised from my entry in my grief notebook.

[...] You know wind by its effects. No one has seen wind, but since its effects are so observable, it would be idiocy to say that it did not exist. [...]

[...] It is like the branch that moves, so that you know the wind by its effects; and a windbag like me by the billowing gale of my monologues.

[...] You can, of course, feel the invisible wind against your cheek, but touch involves an immediacy different from the distant perceptions of sight and smell. [...]

[...] It bends with the wind. It does not bend when there is no wind, nor does it stiffen, stopping the flow of sap to the treetop for fear that the dumb tree, not knowing what it was up to, would bump its head against the sky.

Now as seasons come and go,
He visits twice a week,
From worlds that have no wind or snow,
But still have promises to keep.

[...] It floundered like a wet rag in a foul wind. [...]

[...] You felt an onrush — or should I say an onslaught? — of data in its pure form, rushing through the inner senses like a wind in a kaleidoscope because you did not know how to control or disentangle it.