The Day the Wind Started Blowing

nope, not my picture…Translated…

After passing through a period of life where there’s nothing but meals, drinking meds, and sleeping, I couldn’t help but start doubting, the value of my own existence, gladly, my energy is getting better, and I’m, recuperating too, I’d listened to the band, Dutch Hyacinth’s album, “The Day the Wind Started Blowing”.

That was, at the mountain regions of Hsinchu, where the strong winds would hit, a group of farmers, in the midst of working in their fields, they’d wrote and performed the songs with independent singers.  “The Day the Wind Started Blowing” is about the sudden onset of the storm in a person’s life, how it’d messed up the original way of life, love, family, as well as the tempo of happiness were all traveling, another way of describing it was “The day I went crazy”.

Psychologically ill persons, like you and I, maybe, they will, make their full recoveries, maybe not, but, because of this unwarranted fear from the general public, the label of “crazy” and “nuts” would tag along behind the individuals endlessly.  And so, they’d called themselves, as a joke, “The Crazies/Winded Community”, offered one another supports, and placed their trusts in one another, and thus the name, “Hyacinth” was what they were named, they’d challenged the mainstream’s prejudices of those who are mentally ill, released themselves from the balls and chains of the hospital, they lived, and worked, with their illnesses, intact.

I’d heard from before, that when these “Windy” people start singing, do they sing words of nonsense, as if, they’re all, going crazy, or, are the winds more like gentle breezes, I’d never heard, so, I wouldn’t know.  Until I’d pressed that play button on the CD player, there was, a mixture of rap, rock and roll, folk music, and bassa nova, with the layers that were meant to make the music even more dramatic…boy, how well they sung together!

“The sick leaves are yellow, but my illness, it’s, transparent.”

We couldn’t see, but we’d all heard about the transparencies of the psychological disorders.  Although it’s at the time when the breezes started blowing, but the heart, too soft to mention, hearing the children of the wind, sang to the baby bok choy in the garden, those lovely, love songs.  As the wind started, there’s still, that aching sensation inside, sighing about, how the lovers met not in the right time, and, all one can do, is to, let go, and wish her/him the best.

I’d kept imagining, how much strength it must’ve taken, for these singers, to rip off that Band-Aid on their wounds.  And still, who can say, that one’s own life is, entirely, smooth-sailing?  Don’t we all have our separate cages that kept us locked up inside of, with that sense of learned helplessness too?  Who isn’t draining oneself, working too hard, straining oneself away, trying to, meet up with the expectations of capitalism?  Who isn’t waiting, for that old flame, to come back around, like a crazy person in love?

Being lucky as I, even as the storms hit me, I can still tolerate, the ups and downs of life, because of my flexible schedule.  But, don’t the Windies also need the understanding of the rest of the world?  And now, this group of friends had, found, a form of labor, on the farms, where they can, coexist in peace, with their mental illnesses, not longer treated as a psychological disorder, continually, growing, on the soils with the right sets of nutrients, fitted for just them.

As the autumn breezes were starting, I’d leaned on the railings of my lanai, enjoyed the breezes, continued to listen to that song, “The Day the Wind Started Blowing”.  But now, I’d come to understand, that there’s no good or bad of the storms of life, every single experience is a gift.  The only thing that needed changing was, the way we view the world, and the way we show support to one another.

And so, you have a group of mentally ill individuals, but, WHO defined them as that?  The world?  But, what right, DOES the rest of the world to define someone as “CRAZY”?  and, this group of “rejects” still found themselves, in their own world, and that just shows, how there ARE no mental illnesses, just the way we interpret the various situations in our lives.