The unseen air

This is essentially a post of quotes from David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous. I took these thoughts with me to the copse where the poplar looks now to be dead. I went to the tree and held her. She felt warm, as though on fire inside. "I am transforming," she said. I could see where a bramble, blown by the wind, had scraped her bark.

Before I left, she said, "We are all the transformations of the wind."

So, to Abram.

“NOTHING IS MORE COMMON TO THE DIVERSE INDIGENOUS CULTURE of the earth than a recognition of the air, the wind, and the breath, as aspects of a singularly sacred power. By virtue of its pervading presence, its utter invisibility, and its manifest influence on all manner of visible phenomena, the air, for oral peoples, is the archetype of all that is ineffable “unknowable, yet undeniably real and efficacious. Its obvious ties to speech—the sense that spoken words are structured breath (try speaking a word without exhaling at the same time), and indeed that spoken phrases take their communicative power from this invisible medium that moves between us—lends the air a deep association with linguistic meaning and with thought. Indeed, the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffability of awareness itself, and we should not be surprised that many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or “mind,” not as a power that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with the other animals and the plants, the mountains and the clouds.”

“Woniya wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all that. Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence.” (This is a quote from John Fire Lame Deer)

“nilch’i, “meaning Wind, Air, or Atmosphere,” suffuses all of nature, and is that which grants life, movement, speech, and awareness to all beings. Moreover, the Holy Wind serves as the means of communication between all beings and elements of the animate world. Nilch’i is thus utterly central to the Diné, or Navajo worldview.”

“From its sacred home in each of the four directions, the Holy Wind is said to approach and enter into the various natural phenomena of the world, and so to provide the means of life, movement, thought, and speech to the plants, to the animals, and to all the other Earth Surface People, including the Navajo people themselves.16”

This comes from the Blessingway ceremony: “With everything having life, with everything having the power of speech, with everything having the power to breathe, with everything having the power to teach and guide, with that in blessing we will live."

"For the Navajo, then, the Air—particularly in its capacity to provide awareness, thought, and speech—has properties that European, alphabetic civilization has traditionally ascribed to an interior, individual human “mind” or “psyche.” Yet by attributing these powers to the Air, and by insisting that the “Winds within us” are thoroughly continuous with the Wind at large—with the invisible medium in which we are immersed—the Navajo elders suggest that that which we call the “mind” is not ours, is not a human possession. Rather, mind as wind is a property of the encompassing world, in which humans—like all other beings—participate. One’s individual awareness, the sense of a relatively personal self or psyche, is simply that part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through, and around one’s particular body; hence, one’s own intelligence is assumed, from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling psyche of the land. Any undue harm that befalls the land is readily felt within the awareness of all who dwell within that land. And thus the health, balance, and well-being of each person is inseparable from the health and well-being of the enveloping earthly terrain.”

“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, for ancient Mediterranean cultures no less than for the Lakota and the Navajo, the air was once a singularly sacred presence. As the experiential source of both psyche and spirit, it would seem that the air was once felt to be the very matter of awareness, the subtle body of the mind. And hence that awareness, far from being experienced as a quality that distinguishes humans from the rest of nature, was originally felt as that which invisibly joined human beings to the other animals and to the plants, to the forests and to the mountains. For it was the unseen but common medium of their existence.”

“In the oral, animistic world of pre-Christian and peasant Europe, all things—animals, forests, rivers, and caves—had the power of expressive speech, and the primary medium of this collective discourse was the air.”

“This invisible yet palpable realm of whiffs and scents, of vegetative emanations and animal exhalations, was also the unseen repository of ancestral voices, the home of stories yet to be spoken, of ghosts and spirited intelligences—a kind of collective field of meaning from whence individual awareness continually emerged and into which it continually receded, with every inbreath and outbreath.”