A virus that attacks respiration has many of us focusing on our breath. In his recent essay on “The Meaning of Air,” Boyce Upholt takes us through a journey of the chemical composition of air, its place in natural and cultural evolution, and the disproportionate and deleterious effects of Industrial Era pollution on communities of color: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-meaning-of-air/
What Upholt recognizes, among his many other poignant insights, is that human perception of the air that we breathe has been altered from its quasi-divine status in antiquity to its current status as backdrop for a predominantly tangible, material world. His characterization of our “re-making of air” is apt for our current context, when respiration is threatened so violently by post-Industrial pollution, and when chilling echoes of “I can’t breathe” reverberate in our communal consciousness. The sad, resulting disdain for air quality reflects humanity’s alienation from nature and from each other. It also signifies the rank injustice of equal access to healthy air quality for all.
“For the Greek philosopher Anaximenes, the swirling ever-thereness of air suggested its primacy: it is from air that all things are derived. The air inside us—our breath—is our soul, and it is connected with the surrounding breath that is the universe, forever threading in and out.
Nature, then, was less a thing than a process: a swirl of forces that produced the material world. Then came Christianity with its lone god. Gone were the various spirits of clouds and thunder; God’s singular supremacy meant that he must exist far beyond this world. So the idea of nature shifted: it became a kind of drapery—lovely, perhaps, but far from sacred—that our god had hung across the globe. A solid, tangible thing. This new thinking only drove humans further away from nature. After all, if we’re made in God’s image, then mustn’t we be better than nature too? Thus the Bible commands us to fill the earth and subdue it. Along the way, we began to remake the air.”
The air that we breathe is a healing balm for what ails us in the biosphere. If only we could recognize the potent, holy Breath/Spirit (from the Greek Pneuma/Pneumatos which means breath, spirit) permeating all creation, perhaps we would recognize it as the common thread that weaves life itself throughout the web, infusing life and energy to stir us into being. Maybe it is time to go back to the beginning, to revisit the “Mighty Wind” that witnesses the birth of all creation into unfathomable diversity and goodness, teeming with abundant life and energy.
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth—and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.”
—Genesis 1:1–2
How might we imagine a world where the air that we breathe holds a scintillating aliveness, worthy of our utmost care and protection?
What personal and communal steps can we take to protect and nurture healthy air quality for all?
—Laura Weber, Prairiewoods associate director and retreats coordinator