"... Nothing is more common to the diverse indigenous cultures 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 indigenouse 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."

"...Phenomenologically considered--experientially considered--the
changing atmosphere is not just one component of [our current]
ecological crisis, to be set alongside the poisoning of the waters,
the rapid extinction of animals and plants, the collapse of complex
ecosystems, and other human-induced horrors. All of these, to be
sure, are interconnected facets of an astonishing dissociation--a
monumental forgetting of our human inherence in a more-than-human
world. Yet our disregard for the very air we breathe is in some
sense the most profound expression of this oblivion.

For it is the air that most directly envelops us; the air, in other
words, is that element that we are most intimately in. As long as
we experience the invisible depths that surround us as empty space,
we will be able to deny, or repress, our thorough interdependence
with the other animals, the plants, and the living land that
surrounds us. We may acknowledge, intellectually, our body's reliance
upon those plants and animals that we consume as nourishment, yet
the civilized mind still feels itself somehow separate, autonomous,
independent of the body and of bodily nature in general. Only as
we begin to notice and to experience, once again, our immersion in
the invisible air do we start to recall what it is to be fully a
part of this world. ...[When that happens,] this breathing landscape
is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history
unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions
participate. As the regime of self-reference begins to break down,
as we awaken to the air, and to the multiplicitous Others that are
implicated, with us, in its generative depths, the shapes around
us seem to awaken, to come alive....


	- David Abram
		from "The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air"
		in, *The Spell of the Sensuous*, (Vintage, 1997).
-