The Wind as Messenger, The Wind as Spirit: Notes from The Mugworts Clinic
A transmission from Eon Meridian
I serve as a clinical herbalist. At The Mugworts Free Herbal Clinic, anyone can enter the circle and receive a free herbal intake. Each month, the clinic shares an incredible newsletter, and this month I contributed a musing on the wind — the old one, the trickster one, the one that teaches through disturbance.
You can read the full piece and subscribe here.
This Autumn, the Wind Feels Like an Omen
The wind this season has been uncanny.
Not merely cold or strong, but sentient — the kind of wind that gathers in the hollows of trees and waits. A wind that opens thresholds.
In Chinese medicine, such a wind is not just meteorology. And in the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine, there is an entire chapter devoted to it:
“The Pathologies of Wind.”
The ancients understood that the weather has a personality, a will, and sometimes instructions.
Wind Outside Becomes Wind Within
In herbalism, “wind” is not a metaphor. It moves through the interior world:
– the unsettled thoughts,
– the digestive churning,
– the sudden dizziness,
– the sense of being displaced from one’s own center.
Wind perturbs. Wind reorganizes. Wind transforms.
It is the original disruptor of the Five Elements.
The Neijing Suwen tells us:
“In the spring the wind comes from the east… Illness occurs in the liver channel and rises to the head.”
This is not superstition — it is cosmology.
Spring wind awakens liver wind - spring is an excellent time for liver detox and eating bitter green vegetables that tonify the liver.
Wind is the hinge between what was and what will be.
Whenever you feel “scattered,” remember:
Somewhere in your system, a new season is coming.
Many Cultures Knew the Wind as a Spirit Being
Long before weather was reduced to numbers and forecasts, it was understood as a spirit with moods.
– The Greeks feared and revered Boreas, bringer of rapture and devastation.
– The Aztecs honored Ehecatl, whose breath set creation into motion.
– The Tibetans tie prayers to the wind-horse, Lungta, because wind is what carries fate.
– In the Levant, the wind has dispositions; the Arabic word nasīm means the breath-wind, the tenderness-wind, and is the wind of love poetry, mystical Sufi writings, and Bedouin weather lore.
Reading the Old Texts
When I turn to the early medical texts, I often think of Kenneth Rexroth, the anarchist poet who walked among classics, another version of our ancestors. He communicated the aliveness of these works.
The Neijing is not only a medical manual.
It is a cultural text of the body-as-cosmos.
We read:
“In ancient times, the sages observed the signs and adapted themselves, so they were unaffected by the ‘evil wind’ and lived long lives.”
“Evil wind” does not mean demonic.
It means a wind arriving before one is ready — a misalignment between inner weather and outer world - a wind that causes disturbance.
And this line echoes something from the Essene Gospel of Peace:
“In everything that is life is the law written…
You find it in the grass, the tree, the river, the mountain.”
If the law of life is written everywhere, then the wind is not simply air in motion.
It is a law of life, a literal page in the book of nature.
What the Wind Asks of Us Now
This time of year, the wind becomes a threshold guardian.
It ushers us out of one energetic world and into another.
When the wind is erratic, and our own spirits are stirring.
The sages did not fight the wind.
They adjusted themselves to it — breath, posture, rhythm, heart.
Wind asks us to be permeable yet anchored,
to let movement enter without losing form,
to let change arrive without losing soul.
It is the first teacher of transformation.
If you feel called to work with the wind in your own body — through herbs, breath, or attunement — you are welcome to book a free intake at the Mugworts Clinic.