When my dad died, the storms came again. I hid in my basement apartment in Chicago as the biggest storms of my life raged outside my windows every day. Sometimes they brought intimidating dark clouds to greet me, and other days they roared in with full wind and hail, shaking my apartment and threatening mass destruction. As the mystery of death laughed in my face, I grasped for my dad and cried into the storm to bring him back. But each day all I felt was wind, widening the cracks in my man-made house of protection. It tore off one piece at a time, going for the roof first. Bricks pried apart, the shingles rattled and ripped off, slowly revealing pieces of the sky. The wind blew in, shaking everything it touched. Jerking open the cupboards, the air blew into every part of my being. It reached into the back corners and crevices, leaving no shadow left untouched.

After about a year, the storms settled enough for me to catch up with them. My shaken legs finally took hold on the ground once again, and I was able to stand up in my new living arrangements. I caught my breath with the unfamiliar fresh air around me and looked up. At this point I could start to see the beautiful pieces of the sky being cleared out above me. 

Before I got too comfortable though, new clouds began rolling in. Not much could match the destructive power I’d been through, but big cracks in my ego’s protection allowed fresh winds to penetrate deeper. A new dance of discomfort came to blow off the rest of the roof and then went for the ground I was standing on. In the guise of gender transition, the rules I’d made for this life were torn to shreds. Each day I found one more brick of my old life ripped apart. A picture of me as a little girl with my mom smashed on the floor. Symbols of the American Dream of career, marriage, and children carelessly tossed about. My old narrow views of success now cast aside, it left a blank slate of the future and no idea what would come next.  The mystery of death already shown to me, now all I’d thought life was, proving to be false as well. The rules I’d once vowed by, all gone.

With nothing but scaffolding left, yoga came and knocked down the remaining skeleton of 2×4’s, leaving nothing but the open sky. The idea of work as the path to happiness was stripped away. The power of money and material things a joke under the infinite vastness of the horizon. The wind blew air into my lungs, lifting me off the ground. No more ladders to climb, the tremendous power of nature pulled me higher. There was nowhere left to hide, nothing else to grasp. Freed from the limiting walls of a house’s false protection, the clouds carried me with ease. Awakened by a force so great, there was no option but to let go. And the wind took me…