If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth: and if the tree falls toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it shall be.
All Commentaries on Ecclesiastes 11:3 Go To Ecclesiastes 11
Didymus the Blind
AD 398
This sentence obviously is meant in a figurative and spiritual sense.… The south is in many ways distinguished from the north geographically, but also in a spiritual sense: The bride in the Song of Songs says, “Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind!” So she sends the evil power away. The evil power was within her. When the evil was active, that is, the evil regarding faith and vocation, then she had the north wind living within. When she “turned away from evil” and went to the doing of good, she called for the south wind. Pay attention to the occasion: “Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad,” [she says to the south wind]; the north wind does not do this. She uses the terms in a quite physical sense, since the “cold wind” is called “north wind.” The cold wind closes the openings of the trees, the socalled invisible pores, so that the elements of fragrance are kept inside. But when the warm south wind blows through the garden of the soul, … then the pores are widened.
