The Wisdom of the Wind: Learning Life’s Lessons in Silence and Motion
Carl Sandburg’s “Wind Song” reminds us that peace isn’t found by resisting life’s winds, but by listening to its music.
Wind Song
Carl Sandburg
LONG ago I learned how to sleep,
In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,
In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,
In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, “Who, who are you?”
I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson.
There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds.
Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine,
Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars:
Who, who are you?
Who can ever forget
listening to the wind go by
counting its money
and throwing it away?
Carl Sandburg’s “Wind Song” captures the profound art of surrender and listening. In his orchard of wind and whispers, he finds a quiet teacher—the wind itself. The poem invites us to hear what is often unheard: the gentle language of movement, rest, and release. Sandburg’s “sleep lesson” isn’t about slumber; it’s about learning to rest in the world as it is, letting go of the need to control what naturally flows.
When was the last time you paused long enough to hear life’s “wind song”? What did it whisper to you?