Windblown

On bending and bowing, but not breaking

Just after Christmas, I took my teenage children to see the Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. My daughter Rosa is a Timothée Chalamet fan (strictly speaking, she tells me, looking over my shoulder, she’s not a ‘fan’, “but he was quite good in Little Women”), and my son Arlo has over the past year taken to singing and playing guitar. I had a hunch we might each find something in it. And we did.

Not long after getting home from the film, I nipped upstairs and was astonished and delighted to hear Arlo behind his bedroom door, singing:

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, The answer is blowing in the wind

Timothée “quite good in Little Women” Chalamet as Bob Dylan

I learned Blowin in the Wind in my local village band - The Banknock Kids. Run by local schoolteacher, Malcolm Cowie, the Kids rehearsed every Saturday at our Stirlingshire village hall. Jackie, our local taxi driver, played the drums and convoyed us by minibus to occasional gigs gifted to cottage hospitals, hospices and community centres across the Central Belt of Scotland. I loved it, and it’s a formative part of my journey to writing, singing and telling stories now, and to understanding how music can breathe life and love into communities.

Me back at Bankier Primary School in Banknock earlier this year

Though Blowing in the Wind wasn’t one of my big solo numbers (at the age of 10, 11, 12, I had the rather eclectic lead vocalist repertoire of Bowie’s Space Oddity, Dolly’s Jolene and Shalom Secunda and Aaron Zeitlin’s Yiddish parable Donna, Donna, made famous by Joan Baez), it’s one of the songs that stuck with me, and which helped propel my interest in the interrogative job of work that songs can do, and the ethical and historical frame around them.

Wind plays a big part in my life, both literally and symbolically. I know some folks feel torn apart by it, run for cover, but I find the wind enervating, scouring and oddly calming. It enables me, as my friend and colleague Robert Macfarlane puts it, to “rinse my ears clean of human chatter”. Besides, life on the stark east coast of Scotland would be a right hard go if a body couldn’t find a way to coexist with the wind.

Scene from Wind Resistance: Aly Wight

My first foray into making theatre, back in August 2016, was Wind Resistance (produced by the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh for Edinburgh International Festival), a hymn to peatbogs and priests, moss and midwifery. It took as its central motif a skein formation - the shifting, sinewy flight of pink-footed geese, an aerodynamic process of collective refuge-making and shared effort, in which each bird takes a turn at the head of the avian team:

stepping up, falling back, labouring and resting.

This week, I’m thinking on Richard Bach’s aphorism: “We teach best what we most need to learn”. I’ve been stepping up and labouring in public spaces for a long time now, a real privilege and joy at its best. But this is, at last, a season for falling back and resting, for retreating, writing and being home, for helping my daughter with her geography homework on an evening, maybe even building a shed with her and my own dad. Perhaps my wee goose skein mantra can show me the way.

Bending and Bowing in Windblown, Edinburgh (August 2025): Mihaela Bodlovic

It’s a week since I finished an Edinburgh Fringe run with a new theatrical storytelling piece called Windblown (produced by Raw Material Arts). It gives voice to a 200-year-old palm at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the longest-lived plant in the Living Collection, felled during restoration work in 2021. The huge, sinewy Sabal, beloved by gardeners and visitors alike, evolved to withstand hurricanes in its natural ecological niche but lived its entire life cosseted, imprisoned under glass, never once catching a bluster in its vast crown. As a result, it grew tall but unsteady and lacked the resilience that its cells promised. It was kept upright for the last decade of its life, by means of a Velcro collar and three steel yacht rigging ropes, tethered to the columns of the palm house itself.

In Windblown, the old palm sings:

I long for the wind, how I long for the wind, for the salt breeze rustling through my leaves, for the shaking it up and the shaking it out

And like every organism, including us, it dreams of being its true self:

I was made to bend and bow, I was made to swing and sway, I was wrought by the ocean and the wind in my DNA

Microscopy image of the old palm via Dr Alison Roberts, James Hutton Institute July 2025

I’ve been blasted all spring and summer by forces beyond my control, the inexorable swirl of a sort of interpersonal hurricane and its aftermath. This isn’t the kind of wind that cleans the ears. It’s the kind that rips coastal dunes away, that toppled the big Sycamore at the foot of my garden two weeks ago. It’s the kind that fells a body.

I did not fall. And I did not break. At least not altogether. But I bent and bowed and splintered as another did. And though no harm was intended, harm ensued. The worst of it though is not to me.

Love and respite to all those who fall, who don’t know how to stay standing.

The Sycamore in my garden just missed my neighbour’s pigeon loft

I’ve been running these past few weeks after a hiatus of many years - to fill my lungs, to clear my head, to rinse those ears - running with another wee mantra in my head, which has only recently come my way:

Breath like the wind, the well-wishing wind

It’s born of a series of one-to-one mindfulness sessions I’ve been attending, propelled by a knowing that I need some practical, embodied strategies to ensure I keep myself upright in these wildering times, domestic and global. At a recent session, my guide on this adventure suggested a meditation, drawn from Buddhist tradition, which we adapted a little to include the looping line:

Breath like the wind, the well-wishing wind

The ‘well-wishing’ bit is important to me because my aim from these weekly sessions is compassion, both for those exiting my life and for myself. This isn’t easy in every moment. But it comes more readily every day, breath by breath.

Well wishes to you all.

Karine

PS the Fringe show went well …