Wind

[Rakeela]

One of the long projects for me since arriving on Earth has been the spiritual contemplation of wind.  There are notable gaps in my past life memories around matters of divinity.  I was passively faithless in one life, and actively false in another.  It feels rather as though I remember what I believed in, and so I remember a lot of very material things.  I might not remember that there were deities of that world at all had I no memory of petty blessings and blasphemies (these being social rather than spiritual) and the material forms of holy constructs (such as a building I would characterize as a dragon cathedral).  Many of the blessings (but hardly any of the blasphemies) centered around the wind.  It was a dragon goddess of wind in whose service I was false.  We did not curse the wind.  Inconvenient though it might be, who could but feel honored by the arrival of a storm?

Wind for dragons was many things.  It was of course travel, which was also visibility.  Even we shapeshifters knew no way but to fly in our own forms.  The presence of dragons in an area would thus not be wholly concealed unless we were willing to scuttle across the surface of the earth.  Wind was also planning amidst chaos.  Wind was unpredictable and yet necessary to predict.  The earth and sun were stable, and so it was the wind that determined sun, cloud, and rain.  The least winds could be fortune and woe in hunting, and as all people in that land had learned to chart their territories with paper plans, so we knew well the greater winds could show fortune and woe in farming and construction.  Very often the pleasantness of construction could be changed by wind, and sometimes great winds could tear down weak constructs.  The wind in all its variations flowed everywhere and touched all.  That which was like wind could be mapped like wind as well, for wind is not the only thing that flows everywhere and touches all it can.

Sometimes I am enveloped by a feeling of phantom wind.  To praise the wind can cause it, as can the sight of storms, or the sound of thunder.  It is cold upon me and yet tremendously welcome, bringing with it alertness, peace, and optimism.  As well, my social life is touched by wind, as I remember long a day spent in windy weather, and when interacting with others goes well I find occasionally the unexpected reward of phantom winds thereafter.

[Rakeela]

I don't have to think about wind to feel it, sometimes.

I used to feel a phantom tail, phantom wings.  I even had some of the usual stories of the world seeming to bend in little ways to a phantom tail.  People tripping over it, doors rebounding off of it, this one time some schoolyard jerk came up behind me and stomped on it.  I don't know where he got the idea.  Well, none of the phantom limb sensation stuck around when someone told me spirituality was boring, even though telling me that couldn't make me not a dragon.  The phantom wind sense survived through years.  I didn't need to think of wind as a spiritual phenomenon to care about it as though it were.  To risk a bit of materialism, maybe part of my brain watches the rest of me, and can reward me with the sensation of wind.  Otherwise, maybe it really is a spiritual holdover from a life of false service to a wind goddess.  I'd like that better.  It's part of my reward function either way.