Thunder rumbles in slate skies and Mike Simons looks for rain.

But no rain yet.

Still, he hitches the box in his arms a little higher and pushes past the sign hanging on the front door of his one-bedroom apartment. May the warm winds of Heaven blow softly on your home, it says. And the Great Spirit bless all who enter there.

It’s 3:30 p.m. and four people are here. Five, counting the woman trailing behind him.

And it’s a tight fit in a modest living room that’s part seating area, part recording studio: The No-Snow Naples Flute Circle is usually held on the ample open-air deck outside the complex clubhouse, but “electronics and lightning,” he says, “are not a good combination.”

Simons, 51, assesses the group as he deposits the box on a cafe table. He only knows one person.

“We’re going to play around with a lot of stuff tonight. Welcome,” starts Simons, who has well-pruned salt-and-pepper hair and beard and wears a white cotton shirt tucked into cargo shorts with ankle socks and Reeboks. Neat.

He polls the group as he lays out a case with most of his 15 Native American flutes. Two women heard about it in Natural Awakenings, a free monthly with a New Age edge. Two others, both men from Argentina, are just tagging along with one of the Awakenings women. The fifth, Patsy Rice, has worked with him before.

“I can’t say I’ve progressed much,” says Rice when he settles in to the last chair, the one not far from the TV. Rice says the spirit told her she must learn to play the flute. “The four, five and six fingers” — the fingers that control the lower sets of holes — “some days they work and some days they don’t.”

Simons smiles and nods as he attaches a budlike microphone to the little Velcro dot on his flute, which, like most, is basically a wooden pipe with holes and a block near the mouthpiece that funnels the musician’s breath.

It may not have been made by native hands: The form, which traces its origins to 600 years after the death of Christ, triggers the name, not the race of the maker. And unlike the kind of flute you’d see in an orchestra pit, this instrument is played vertically, like a recorder. Another difference: It’s played in a pentatonic scale (not a diatonic scale), the one the black keys on the piano play.

“I usually have an electronic set-up, a PA system set-up with a mic on, not to make you publicly perform,” he explains, “but so you can see some of the electronic effects that can enhance performance.”

Most watch him blankly. What is he talking about?

Then he plays the pure, honeyed tone of wild places, open spaces and every documentary ever made on the American Indian. The simple sound is both mournful and romantic, calm and strangely riveting. And the amplifier heightens the mysterious effect, culling images of a lone musician playing on the edge of a gorge, the echo becoming an invisible second player.

One women grins as he plays. Another closes her eyes. The others stare into a misty distance as if they’re mainlining a meditative mixture of sound and spirit.

They clap happily when the flute leaves his lips.

- - -

Simons had been playing the English recorder for almost 10 years when he first heard a native flute in 1989.

“I said, ‘What issss that sound?’” he says.

Simons moved here from Dayton, Ohio, in September, becoming Internet sales manager for Germain Lexus of Naples. He brought his girlfriend (“We’re married. We just don’t have the paper”), recording and amplification equipment, his Native American flutes, percussion instruments and an interest in Native American ideals.

“I asked her ‘Where do you want to go for the next 50 years’,” he says of Leslie Bartos, a pretty massage therapist he’s been dating about two years. Bartos, 44, is his roadie, personal historian, muse and percussion section — both at meetings of the circle and during performances their musical group, Crazy Horse & Company. “I’m Crazy Horse. She’s company.”

With a background track, occasional guest artists and Bartos on percussion, Simons puts the native flute into songs that stray from the often pensive melodies associated with native composers. Jazz, calypso, reggae, rock. He calls it out of the box.

Simons created the No Snow Naples Flute Circle not long after arriving. Like the one he helped start in Ohio three years earlier, the circle is an open forum where people talk, he teaches and everyone performs. He calls the two- or three-hour sessions “an incredible afternoon of spiritually uplifting Native American Indian music” for “all flute players, flute makers, drummers as well as other musicians.”

Sort of like day camp for adults.

As Bartos pats a small, white Middle Eastern drum, Simons tells the group a version of the instruments’ origin story. Like any good romance, the story starts with a boy who falls in love with a girl, but can’t have her unless he proves his worth, which turns out to be something of a puzzle. He doesn’t have a lot to give.

So he begins to track an elk.

“But the elk took him from the normal hunting ground and got him lost,” Simons says.

A woodpecker shows the brave the way out of his dilemma, leading him to a fallen tree branch, hollow and with holes drilled by a bird. The wind rushes through the branch, delivering a haunting song that’s called “Maiden in the Mist.”

“The heart of the wood is gone,” says Simons as the woodpecker. “The only way to get that sound is to put your own heart in that.”

It ends pretty much as you’d expect.

“You didn’t say that they lived happily ever after,” Bartos teases.

“They lived happily ever after.”

“And they opened a Web site and began selling flutes online.”

Everyone laughs.

- - -

Bob Mann sells hundreds of flutes every year through Grand Canyon Flutes, an online site that, with more than a thousand available, touts itself as having the “World’s Largest In Stock Selection.” The flutes he carries range in price from basic instruments that cost under $50 to those with elaborate carving or inlay by well-known makers priced at $500 or more.

Mann, a flute enthusiast and former pro golfer who owns the company, describes the kind of people drawn to the instrument as evenly divided between the sexes, mainly non-native and upper-class. They’re mellow, he says.

“These people are just sweethearts to deal with — mild mannered, very pleasant and very spiritual. They have strong spiritual convictions and they see the flute as an extension of the spiritual aspect of their personality.”

That’s what drew Sarah Watts to the instrument.

“It’s the spirituality,” says the 26-year-old junior at Florida Gulf Coast University. She attended two of Simons’ circles with her mother and owns two flutes she calls Featherwind and Nadine. “The stories around it. The feel of it. You know, when you play it. The sounds. I don’t know if you know, I’m totally blind. It’s just the way it sounds and the way it feels. ... It speaks to me in a way that a lot of other music doesn’t.

“I might not be Native American, but in a lot of ways, I do hold with their beliefs.”

There’s romance there in the notion of a people at one with the land, with their gods and with each other. And we still gravitate to romantic notions, even if they’re not our own or perhaps were not really true.

“I think now so many people are so disconnected from themselves and their families are so dysfunctional,” explains Oannes, a native activist and historian as well as director of the Yat Kitischee Native Center in Naples, “people are trying to grasp some brass ring to return to some time that was better.”

But many Native Americans aren’t comfortable with the appropriation of some generic notion of Indian tradition, which in reality varies widely from tribe to tribe. Some argue that the native flute has been virtually co-opted by non-natives.

“There is a concern about the misuse of the Native American spirit, and the flute is one aspect of that.” He describes the problem: non-natives who pose as Indian medicine men, purport to perform Indian ceremonies or play sacred songs outside of their proper context.

“All I can say is if people who play the flute and perform do so by respecting the origins and the culture and are up front about who they are and how they came to the instrument, I think that’s fine.”

And Oannes — with wife Betty Hurst, Saponi and Blackfoot artist and flute maker — left one of Simons’ circles unperturbed.

“He’s a very nice person, very sincere and very respectful,” says Oannes, who also produces a radio program called “Indigenous Voices.” “Some of the things he explained to the people were inaccurate. But he was very open to being informed as to the accurate information. And that’s not always the case.”

(One caveat. “I’m not in favor of the use of Crazy Horse” in Simons’ jazz group. “Crazy Horse was a very important Lakota patriot.”)

“I think now, especially in the 21st century,” Oannes says, “everyone needs to learn everyone else’s culture.”

- - -

By the end of the session, there is a lot of talk about the spirit and the journey.

As in: “What did you feel? Did you start to feel the spirit?”

Or: “I don’t want to let you think I’m beating my own drum. I wanted to show you where the journey took me.”

Or even: “I’m trying to help you understand to get in the spirit, the journey of the instrument.”

This is Simons — a teacher, preacher and musical father confessor rolled into one.

He hands out all his flutes in the key of A. Then he walks them through with the scale, asking them to trust their ears and their fingers as they create the physical memory they’ll rely on later.

They work through the handful of notes, a repetitive snippet that sounds a lot like the wheezy, off-the-beat first day of a first-grade music class.

When the group puts down their flutes, they conjure a mixed-bag-of-a-smile — with tension, embarrassment and maybe a little glee.

“It’s fun actually,” someone says. “It doesn’t sound good but its fun.”

Simons runs through the scale again. This time by himself. In his hands, even the scale is melodic and hauntingly beautiful.

He knows they’re wondering why they don’t sound that good. He knows because he wondered the same thing when he started playing. So he reassures them that he’s been where they are; that it’s easy to learn; that, essentially, where you are is where you’re at. And that’s OK.

“Let’s try it again from the bottom up.”

There are shrill bits, notes that run out of gas mid-breath and the seed of something pretty.

“Everybody is OK where they are in the journey,” he tells them. “You’ve been playing a year? Great. You’ve been playing 10 years? Great. ... It’s your desire to step in the journey.”

If you go

What: No Snow Naples Flute Circle

When: Next circle will be held 3:30-5:30 p.m. on Sept. 9

Where: 2000 River Reach Dr.

Admission: Free

Information: 262-0298 or mikesimons@msn.com