atmos sphere

The Air Aware | Orion Magazine

Indeed, whenever indigenous, tribal persons speak, often matter-of-factly, about “the spirits,” we moderns mistakenly assume, in keeping with our own impoverished sense of matter, that they’re alluding to a supernatural set of powers unrelated to the material world. We come much closer to the shadowed savvy of our indigenous sisters and brothers, however, when we recognize that the spirits they speak of have more in common with the myriad gusts, breezes, and winds that influence life in any locale—like the wind that barrels along the river at dusk, chattering the cottonwood leaves, or the mist-laden breeze that flows down from the foothills on certain mornings, and those multiple whirlwinds that swirl and rise the dust on hot summer days, and the gentle zephyr that lingers above the night grasses, and the various messenger-winds that bring us knowledge of what the neighbors are cooking this evening. Or even the small but significant gusts that slip in and out of our nostrils as we lie sleeping. We moderns pay little heed to these subtle invisibles, these elementals—indeed we tend not to notice them at all, convinced that a breeze is nothing other than a mindless jostling of molecules. Our breathing bodies know otherwise. But we will keep our bodies out of play; we will keep our thoughts aligned solely with what our complex instruments can measure. Until we have indisputable evidence to the contrary, we will assume that matter itself is utterly devoid of felt experience. In this manner we hoard and hold tight to our own awareness—like a frightened whirlwind spinning ever faster, trying to convince itself of its own autonomy, struggling to hold itself aloof from the ocean of air that surrounds it.