The Invisible Air

Invisibility.  That's what air is.  It is the one physical thing in life that is invisible.  How can that be?  How can I know about something I cannot see?

Mind you, I'm not talking about that kind of invisibility I enjoy seeing in a magician's act, when the magician makes a rabbit or his assistant -- which are visible -- vanish and then reappear.  Air is more than that:  I never see air itself at all.

Air thus becomes a reminder to me that I should not just look upon the surface of things, but should also remember what my eyes cannot see.  The 16th century spiritual director Francis de Sales (like many religious teachers) instructed Christians that when they meet someone, they should not evaluate based on that person's outward appearance.  Instead, De Sales said, look into that person's heart.  Indeed, I have seen many actions of loving people, but has anyone ever seen love itself?

However, air is not just a reminder to remember that which cannot be seen.  It is also something that sustains life itself.  In the creation story in Genesis, Chapter 2, after God forms the human out of the ground, God breathes into the human's "nostrils the breath of life" --  air -- and the human comes to life!  (Gen. 2:7)  Also, in both the Old Testament and New Testament of the Bible, the words for "breath" and "spirit" are identical.

Moreover, it is not simply that the air we inhale sustains our physical life.  Fresh air can also revive our spirits and invigorate us.  After visiting Lake Tahoe, Mark Twain quipped that "three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor... [because] the air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine."

Unlike any other feature of Nature, invisible air touches our bodies everywhere.  When the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wanted to find a way to speak of God's feminine presence, close and ready to nurture us at any moment, Hopkins wrote of the...

"wild air, world-mothering air,

Nestling me everywhere,

That each eyelash or hair

Girdles."

Hopkins evokes not just the softness of air (able to touch eyelashes without harming them). He also says, "wild air."  Yes, it is true that air sometimes becomes too wild, too powerful, even turning into a hurricane that is able to sweep our unprepared houses away. But, with time, the hurricane stops.

And once that terrifying possibility has died down, air remains all around us.  Invisible.  Life and spirit, just waiting to be inhaled.

~~~

Do you recall a time that air helped revive your spirits?  When and where?

(The lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins are from

"The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air We Breathe.")

A Seed Deeply Lodged

I am sometimes surprised by which people have a love for Nature and a strong interest in it.  For example, of the many people I've had a chance over the years to chat with at the barbershop where I have my hair cut, I discovered a keen interest in Nature in the shoe-shine man.  Among all the people, both customers and barbers, I'm sure his income was the lowest.  And indeed, he has never enjoyed the benefits of Sierra Club outings or family trips to national parks.  Instead, his interest in Nature seems to have stemmed from fishing -- not for sport, but as the way his family put enough food on their table.

Despite that background, his appreciation of Nature is more than utilitarian, more than an interest in its practical value to himself.  He knows all sorts of facts about the animals of the rural landscape he came from before moving to the large city where he now makes a very modest income shining shoes.  To that knowledge he has added information he has gleaned from reading the National Geographic magazines that are a part of the barbershop's reading material.  He and I discovered our mutual interest in Nature when he noticed that I was sometimes browsing in the National Geographic's while I waited my turn.  Now, he alerts me when there is a new issue, digging for it himself among the large stock of periodicals while he tells me about one of the latest articles about Nature.

What intrigues me most about Nature-lovers I have encountered unexpectedly, including that shoe-shine man, is how their sense of the world they value extends far beyond the immediate sphere of their life.  My sister, another Nature-lover, became a biology teacher, filling her middle-school classroom with a variety of plant and animal species.  She says it might have been a sign that she was destined to be a biology teacher when, at the age of four, she accidentally sat on a bumblebee, and her first thought was not whether she would be stung, but instead, "Oh no, I hope I didn't hurt the bee!"

As I have reflected upon the character of these two people and other Nature-lovers I know, it seems to me that one quality they have in common is a humility.  In particular, a humility that manifests itself as an absence of any inappropriate amount of self-importance of themselves as a human being.  They do not over-elevate the human race.  Of course, there are many humble people who have little interest in Nature.  That means that something else is going on within the character of Nature-lovers.  I think that other element is that lively interest in a realm larger than our human sphere.  Their minds come to full attention when someone else tells of an unusual bird they've seen, or an article about animals in National Geographic.

Even though I cannot explain why one child will develop an enjoyment of Nature while another child living in the same setting will not, I do think what one little-known early 20th-century novelist wrote is true.  That writer, Mary Webb, wrote in her book The House in Dormer Forest:

"The love of nature is
 a passion for those in whom it once lodges:

  it cannot be removed."

~~~

Do you have a love for or a fascination with Nature?  Where do you think it came from?

(The Mary Webb quotation is from her novel

 The House in Dormer Forest, © 1921.)