Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Our podcast features in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads,

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, storyteller, and self-described wind walker.

His latest book, Where the Wild Winds Are, tells the story of four European winds and their effects on landscape, people, and culture.

In this essay, Nick continues this exploration,

focusing on the mythological understanding of winds as gods,

experiencing their power firsthand as cause for awe, exhilaration, and fear.

Music and fear. Wading ankle deep in snow, I climbed Mount Mussel.

The frozen path switched back and forth up a steep powder slope that hid the summit from view so I couldn't see

what lay above, but I could hear it.

Something vast was happening there.

It bellowed, throbbed and boomed.

Behind me lay the lower world, the sprawling port of Split and the long Dalmatian coast,

the brightly gleaming Adriatic ruffled into fan-wise waves, but above

was only noise, gigantic and disturbing. Gyrating clouds of icy spin drift lifted, scattered,

and dispersed in whirling vortices as if the mountainside above was being torn up and remade.

My feet approached the final crest and the noise became psychotic. I had come to

Mossaw in order to meet a god. I had tracked him for three weeks, from Trieste in Italy's northeast,

over the Slovenian cast, an arid limestone plateau riddled with caves and sinkholes. I hadn't found

him there, though I had seen

...