The Heart of the Heart
Singer-songwriter Feather Wind sings about nature and life’s lessons
FEATHER WIND went to Oregon a few years back for healing. To revisit places were she’d been abused by a former lover, so she could move forward, softening certain fears and anxieties. While there, a friend encouraged Wind to keep her eyes open for feathers to meditate with.
One day, after walking through the dense, mosscovered spruce forest, Wind arrived at Hobbit Beach to find a seagull feather. It was sticking out of the sand in the middle of the secluded shore. Alone and holding the plume, she felt an instant connection with the earth, which softly encouraged, “Let’s heal this part of you that you came to heal.”
This was before Feather Wind was Feather Wind. Before the Rainbow Gathering, where she met crazynamed people like Leaf and Starfire and Prophet. It dawned upon the Georgia-native then that she could change her name. “Feather” was instantaneous. “Wind” came almost accidentally, when Facebook made her choose a surname.
“I wasn’t creating a new identity,” says the now-29-year-old Sagittariussinger-songwriter. “But an updated, leveled-up version of who I was (am).”
The name embodies her music. The lilt and grace of Wind’s voice, truly like a feather riding the breeze — easily carried by current — over the simple pluck and strum of her ukulele. The gentleness is met with a power, deep and gospel-like, calling back to her roots of singing in the Pentecostal church as a kid.
A lot of Wind’s songs are natureinspired, centering human’s relations to the Mother Earth.
“I put forth effort to make sure she’s protected and clean,” says Wind, who used to do a lot of trash cleanups when she was living in Austin, Texas — a place she considers a “huge catalyst” of musical inspiration. “When I write, I’m usually in nature spaces. The plants around me inform the song.”
Like her “Aspen Tree” song, which she wrote 13ish miles into some BLM land in Tres Piedras a couple Septembers ago at the annual Tribal Vision festival. She was sitting in a grove of aspens, preparing for a women’s circle, when she was playing a melody and words started pouring forth — how the soil nourishes our souls. She felt like the trees gave her the song.
“The earth-based music is where I find my comfort and my learning,” says Wind, who often plays with her guitar-slinging bestie, Tiggs Talismans. “The heart of my music is really just my own heart.”
The vulnerable stuff. The life lessons kind. In “I Can Feel It,” Wind — who’s in the process of self-recording her first album for Bandcamp — takes her power back. “Forgetting the stories and all the ways you’ve said I lack,” she sings, the lyrics a “straight window” into her life. “Breathe” is a reminder to slow down in states of feeling unworthy or unloved. It centers with affirmations of beauty and freedom. “Oh, Love” considers some new love knocking at her door, and, though she knows she shouldn’t open it, she does anyway, because sometimes lessons have to repeat themselves, and we must approach those with grace versus berating ourselves.
Wind has played at the Tribal Vision numerous times, at the High Frequency Loft in the south end, and most recently, at Revolt Gallery as part of the Earth Day Afterparty — a fundraiser in support of giving personhood to the Rio Grande River. There, people sat crosslegged in the near-dark room, swaying with eyes closed to Wind’s music, almost like a lullaby. A relaxing meditation.
Look for Wind around town this summer and visit Feather Wind Music on Facebook, where she uploads live music videos.