wind and duende

Note: Oh great readership of 7 here, alas, is a rather lyric and maudlin contribution. Please skip if you're not in the mood ....
21 October
Fall comes with wind. Maybe this is true all over the world. Is it because the trees, itching to be free of their leaves, ready to plunge down into the dark sleep of winter, call out to it? I’ve wondered. In Los Angeles, despite arguments to the contrary, Fall does come … but it comes late, and sometimes with the winds come fire, not crisp nights, or snow. I remember my first real deciduous autumn, in Colorado, marveling that the golden leaved trees (cottonwoods, aspens) had only just fully turned, when they were raked by those sweeping winds off the Divide. It happens in New Mexico. In Iowa. In Pennsylvania. In New York.
Storms coming in off the Atlantic, over Ireland. From up on our hill today I saw the Bristol Channel was green (a certain kind of stone, lit by a certain kind of light …), rough. Clouds and light. Winds started a couple days ago. Leaves on the ground. Wet with rain. Hard rain … (until now the rain has been so soft, so fine, that from indoors the world appears to be wet with a rain that just passed by, but as soon as you go outside, there it is, falling all around you).
It is hard to break the habit of these late hours. Because in all of my time zones it is early evening, afternoon. Gives the sensation of being somehow unhinged … the body detached from the mind, the mind detached from time.
Went to a lecture by an American poet/teacher tonight. Three teachers and two students were there. I felt sorry for him. But of course he was fine, on his way to Ireland to do a reading. He lived in Swansea on a study abroad year 15 years ago. He’s from Iowa, studied for a while in New Mexico. His presentation all about the importance of going abroad for writers.
He brought up an interesting point—a relation to what the poet Federico Garcia Lorca called Duende … To Lorca the force, the essential struggle, of the artist is not with muse or angel as some have written, but rather with death. Duende is the dance on the edge of death, the dark blossoming into decay, the impish god inside us who, when we face him at last, is the skeleton in the mirror. It is the dark edge to the flamenco dancer’s rhythm, to the gypsy song. Zachary Jack (the lecturer) aligned the act of the writer in living abroad, with facing mortality, confronting duende.
To go away is to die. The self that was before the journey will never return again. It can’t. It will have changed. Heraclitus gave us this idea with his river. I said this before I left, and it was true: I feel as if I died at least a dozen times this past year. Between April and September we said goodbye, and goodbye, and goodbye. And each time it was a small death--not in that I imagined I would never see these people and places again … but that when I do, we will be, as we must be, all changed.
I wonder if trees, facing their own small death every year, ever hope the winds, this time, won’t come. Or if they stand in the wild whipping air and feel the earth below them, feel that the wind is bringing them news from far away.