Breathing Bodies
I spent a summer hiking in the Alps in Southern Germany and Northern Austria where the fingers of mountains touch the passing wisps of clouds. I liked the quiet, and I discovered the crisp thin air of high altitudes. It was invigorating as my body acclimated to a different volume of breathing, and my psychology harmonized to this rhythm: the way I felt was as if I was being breathed by the sky.
I remember one small alpine lake in particular, filled mostly with snow runoff that at that time never fully melted during the course of a year. It was the brightest baby blue and translucent like frosted glass. Backpackers mark these deep alpine trails with rock cairns (stone towers) to keep people from getting lost. Often these cairns build up over many years, with backpackers and local day-hikers adding another small stone to the tower.
One of these cairns stood as a column right at the edge of the lake at a spot where I dove in. Immediately my breath was taken away by the frigid shock of the temperature. It was invigorating; although I felt as though my body reacted on its own and jumped right back out.
In the alps there is a semi-mythical creature known as chamois. They are described as goat-antelope, in that they look like antelope but are the size of goats, and they are notoriously evasive and shy. Until I was drying in the sun on a flat rock in the aftershock of my quick dive into the lake, I had never seen one before. The confluence of altitude, frigid water, warming sun, and sudden appearance of a half dozen chamois created for me a qualitative baseline memory for feeling alive. While there are several really evocative moments in my life to recall in times of uncertainty and distress, this is one of the memories I most often call upon. When I become really preoccupied or stressed, I can remember by the virtue of this experience to ask myself, am I truly living as I felt in the fullness (and emptiness) of that day?
In these mountains, grey wolves are one of the few natural predators (besides humans) of the chamois, and at the time I was hiking in those mountains, the chamois population size was a concern, and grey wolves had not yet recovered from being nearly hunted to extinction (as had happened over large tracts of the Alps where they had fully disappeared).
The feeling I had hiking in these mountains, pausing with the flowers by trickling streams, and lingering in the sun by hidden lakes was one of being at home. While hiking in the Alps I felt open and full of life. But I also felt a bit intrusive, as if I was intruding into the home of the mountains themselves. I worried about the imprint of my life on this beauty even as its imprint on me was awe-inspiring.
A few days hike beyond the small translucent lake, I climbed the Hintereis Glacier with an ice axe, with an eerie sense of destruction as I swung the axe into the surface of the glacier. I’ve never enjoyed using that tool on ice, the sound, or the sensation rippling back through my body. I remember distinctly how it felt, but my mind was set on the destination some meters further up the face and so I continued on. The conversation and concern among alipinists at the time and in this part of the world was how surprisingly quickly the glacier was melting. This was before global warming had entered into the popular consciousness as a subject of emotional debates. I was surprised by the questions about why it was declining in size so quickly, and confused by the context in which it mattered. It is one of those moments in which the ignorance of my ego (and my goal) prevented me from opening to fully understanding.
Glaciers are uniquely affecting to one’s spirit, and the alpine lakes so beautifully hold the sky in their blue depths, but it was on the peaks of mountains, that highest point where there is no step further one can make, that I felt the lightness of being. Each day I peaked a different mountain (they seemed so equidistant, one from the next); some of the tallest in the Alps. At these summits, with the world stretched out in every direction, my body wanted to float. It was frightening in a way. I didn’t trust myself not to leap into the breeze. I kept my body close and rooted to the Earth, and I looked out into the valleys in which small villages still maintained traditional agricultural ways for living. In the lightness of the air, and distance at which I could see, I had the first of many moments where I recognized what I now know as a common refrain of human reflection: that there is no line between the end of a breath the villagers exhale in the valley and the beginning of the inhale I receive at the peak. That shared breath has been an eternal rhythm, in the life of the planet. By the composition of argon, oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, helium, and other elements of the atmosphere, this breath is also breath and life of the universe itself from its earliest embryological stages, and from which we have emerged as individual cells with identities (around 8 billion people and still counting).
And within each person there is a further 30 trillion biological cells that create any one human being, and every cell of your body breathes collectively and in harmony. It is as though there is an infinite and timeless network of breathing, and of which we are a part. The mythical chamois, the villager, the grey wolves, the trees up to 6,000 feet of elevation and the grass of the alpine pastures once crossing the tree-line, the frigid lake, the glacier, and me. Even as I sit here writing, I feel my breath, back in the baseline of that memory, now in this moment of writing, and into the breath as it reaches you in the same moment as these words.
David Abram speaks to the witness of this phenomenon in The Spell of the Sensuous by describing the seemingly invisible network of air by which the world is woven. The air we breathe is so fully everywhere we are, and yet it evades our ability to see it beyond the impressions it makes in the leaves of trees, across the surface of water, and in the ceaseless echoes in the rhythm of our breathing bodies:
What a mystery is the air, what an enigma to these human senses! On the one hand, the air is the most pervasive presence I can name, enveloping, embracing, and caressing me both inside and out, moving in ripples along my skin, flowing between my fingers, swirling around my arms and thighs, rolling in eddies along the roof of my mouth, slipping ceaselessly through throat and trachea to fill the lungs, to feed my blood, my heart, my self. I cannot act, cannot speak, cannot think a single thought without the participation of this fluid element. I am immersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea.
Yet the air, on the other hand, is the most outrageous absence known to this body. For it is utterly invisible. I know very well that there is something there–I can feel it moving against my face and can taste it and smell it, can even hear it as it swirls within my ears and along the bark of trees, but still, I cannot see it. I can see the steady movement it induces in the shapeshifting clouds, the way it bends the branches of the cottonwoods, and sends ripples along the surface of a stream. The fluttering wing feathers of a condor soaring overhead; the spiraling trajectory of a leaf as it falls; a spider web billowing like a sail; the slow drift of a seed through space–all make evident, to my eyes, the sensuous presence of the air. Yet these eyes cannot see the air itself…
… this unseen enigma is the very mystery that enables life to live. It unites our breathing bodies not only with the under-the ground (with the rich microbial life of the soil, with fossil and mineral deposits deep in the bedrock), and not only with the beyond-the-horizon (with distant forests and oceans), but also with the interior life of all that we perceive in the open field of the living present–the grasses and the aspen leaves, the ravens, the buzzing insects and the drifting clouds. (225–226)
Abram goes on to acknowledge how the Aboriginal people of Australia have a worldview (held by other communities as well) that sees individual “things” — from people to the stacked stones of a mountain to the native life of trees — as expressions or entities of consciousness, and vessels of (organized atomic) information; whereas the invisibility of the air illuminates the relationship between. He also relays how the Diné (Navajo) conception of nilch ‘i, “‘meaning Wind, Air, or Atmosphere,’ suffuses all of nature, and is that which grants life, movement, speech, and awareness to all beings…” And, “moreover, the Holy Wind serves as the means of communication between all beings and elements of the animate world” (230).
Abram notes that early Christian missionaries who began to catalog the Diné linguistic worldview singled out the term, nilch ‘i hwii’siziini, “the Wind within one,” as being synonymous with the Christian idea of individuation and individual souls — and through this parallelism pulled the original meaning into the Christian notion of being separated from the world. Scholars have more recently:
…been able to break out of the interpretive blinders imposed by the Christian worldview [at that time] in order to recognize that the powers attributed by Western culture to a purely internal soul or mind are experienced by the Navajo as attributes of the enveloping Wind or Atmosphere as a whole. The ‘Wind within one’ is in no way autonomous, for it is in a continual process of interchange with the various winds that surround one, and indeed is entirely a part of the Holy Wind itself. (231)
In “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” Lynn White made a similar argument about how certain Western European worldviews were superimposed on the “wild” nature of the “Americas” several centuries ago. The land (and indigenous people), the plants and native animals all had to conform to this Western European worldview by force, and often at great loss (often death — Bear Heart detailed some of the horrors of the Trail of Tears). We can see in Abram’s point that efforts were made to even cut the wind off from its inseparable universality. Joanna Macy relates to this phenomenon in how some people see the “World as Battlefield” and “World as Trap” (19–21).
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By contrast, though, Joanna Macy holds hope in how we can also see “World as Lover” and “World as Self” (23–27). In The Wind is My Mother, medicine man Bear Heart shares how his mother introduced him to the world, “to the Four Directions… to this Mother Earth… to the sun… to the wind… to the water… to the full moon… “ and how he, “had a sense of belonging as [he] grew up because of [his] people’s relationship with these elements… [and] that’s why most of [his] people related to the environment so easily” (3–4).
All of this begs to question how often inherited worldviews may superimpose veils of illusion over the beauties of reality. Drawing on the cosmological origin story of the Diné, Abram quotes:
Wind existed first, as a person, and when the Earth began its existence Wind took care of it. We started existing where Darknesses, lying on one another, occurred. Here, the one that had lain on top became Dawn, whitening across. What used to be lying on one another back then, this is Wind. It (Wind) was Darkness. That is why when Darkness settles over you at night it breezes beautifully. It is this, it is a person, they say. From there when it dawns, when it dawns beautifully becoming white-streaked through the dawn, it usually breezes. Wind exists beautifully, they say. (231)
Correspondingly, the terrain of space-time is organized by the cardinal directions (North, South, East, West), and by “the breath of the four sacred mountains that visibly rise at the edge of the Navajo cosmos…[and] Wind is believed by the Diné to be present within a person from the very moment of conception… It is Wind that enables us to speak” (232–233). Speaking is also a network for community (communication and communion which all have the same root of com- (with) and -union (unity/together)).
Bear Heart also describes how many of the lessons he learned from the elders in his tradition, he didn’t learn “in the classroom way” (52). Rather he learned in the classroom of the natural world, where there are no straight walls to box one in, and that learning comes through deep listening and awareness to rhythms beyond human language:
I began to see that, when it comes right down to it, we are nothing until that nothing becomes so dedicated that it is like a vessel through which good things can move, an instrument for receiving knowledge and sharing it with others who might be in need. (53)
It is too common that I find myself (not really) listening, and missing the point of what is being communicated by another person, or even in the lesson of observation in the world more broadly. I’m too often distracted by things that are bothering (or exciting) me, or overly focused on my goal and work, that I can’t see beyond the blinders of my fixations. Bear Heart, like Thich Nhat Hanh who we read previously, invites us to empty ourselves so we can see new possibilities, and to see the reality of beauty that is right here with us when the eyes of our heart are open.
Grey wolves also used to be quite common in the Americas, including in Yellowstone National Park, where they were hunted to extinction. Researches and environmentalists opened their eyes to the reintroduction of the grey wolves twenty-five years ago and were stunned by what they learned. Grey wolves not only affected the populations of their direct prey, but they helped stabilize the entire ecosystem by the way a chain reaction occurred by the infinitely interrelated nature of presence, and included which trees grew where (and how tall — such as “aspen, willow and cottonwood”), the birds that gathered in new branches, and even how the water moved and was held by the banks of the Earth thereby reducing erosion (Farquhar).
The term for this inter-relationship is: trophic cascade. We might begin to see how every breath has implications beyond the reaches of the small circumferences of life that we draw around ourselves. Each breath, is the universe breathing in the body of the Earth shaped as willow trees, songbirds, grey wolves, chamois, and human beings. When we breathe, whether we like it or not, we breathe together.
Some Prompts to Encourage Forward Movement
- Describe a lesson you have learned from or have seen reflected in the natural world.
- Describe a place where you feel yourself breathing more freely. What practices might you start or enhance to support this kind of breathing?
- How can trophic cascades help us begin to open our eyes even more fully to the scientific interrelationships between ourselves and the aspects of the manifest universe around us? What are some examples or interrelationship that you can help us see?
Works Cited
Abrahm, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage Books, 1996.
Farquhar, Brodie. “Wolf Reintroduction Changes Ecosystem in Yellowstone.” Yellowstonepark.com. https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem. Accessed 20 June 2020.
Heart, Bear. The Wind is My Mother. Berkley Books, 1996.
Macy, Joanna. World as Lover, World as Self. Parallax Press, 2007.
White, Lynn. “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science. vol. 155, no. 3767, 1967, pp. 1203–1207.
