Wind and Memory

Memorial Chimes with Boe Chapel in the background

I stayed on campus over break and, to be completely honest, stayed almost completely on the Mohn side of campus, going out twice for a run, a couple times to Thorsen to use their far superior kitchen, and once into town for Thanksgiving dinner with some family friends.  My landscape this last week was rather limited, but that gave me a bit of time to think about the parts of campus I don't usually walk by, including the memorial chime tower.

The memorial chime tower is beautiful in many ways.  It was built in 2003 to commemorate the lives of St. Olaf students who died while attending the school.  The tower was modeled after a Scandinavian church, I believe, and many of the faculty and staff came together that year to help design and build it.  As a memorial, it is fitting that the goal of the structure is to honor the lives of students lost while attending St. Olaf, and, as I found in one article on the St. Olaf website, "serve as a quiet, sacred place of personal reflection and thought."

Looking up at the chimes

What interests me the most is the interplay between the chimes and the wind.  Each chime is engraved with the name of a student and as a group, the chimes a tuned to the key of D, the key of Beautiful Savior.  When the wind blows, the chimes sound beautiful.  This memorial demonstrates, I think unintentionally as none of the articles on the school website mention this, that the school does have a view of nature that is Nature.  These chimes work with the wind, not against it, and not attempting to just use it, but with it to create a beautiful place of thought and reflection.  The memorial's nearness to the chapel is also important.  Here, the interplay between wind and memory brings in another character: spirit.  The wind, playing in the chimes, represent the spirits of those we remember.  They are here, with us, in the wind.  We as humans are a part of the earth.  That's pretty cool.