Video: The Commonwealth of Breath: Climate and Consciousness in a More-than-Human World

Bridging environmental studies with philosophy and anthropology, entwining natural history with theology and psychology, Dr. Abram counterposed the theoretical abstraction of much climate discourse by discussing a range of indigenous, place-based understandings of our planet’s atmosphere and climate.

By listening close to the diverse ways that air, weather, and climate are spoken of by diverse indigenous oral traditions, we may begin to discern the elemental atmosphere in a far more palpable manner, as a sensuous yet enigmatic dimension of reality intimately bound up with human activity, with spoken language, and even with sentience itself—that is, with the full-bodied sentience not only of humans but of other animals, of plants, and of the animate earth itself.

David Abram--cultural ecologist and geophilosopher--is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

CHARLES STANG: Thank you all for coming. Welcome to the Center for the Study of World Religions. I recognize most of you but not all of you. So let me introduce myself. My name's Charles Stang. I have the pleasure of serving as director here. And thank you for coming out this evening. And thank you to the Center's staff as always for helping make this event possible. And let me begin with my ritual plea that you silence your cellphone.

So I have the distinct honor and pleasure of welcoming Dr. David Abram to the Center this evening. Although, I cannot truthfully claim to be one, I understand that David has several old friends here among us, including our own HDS writer residence Terry Tempest Williams, who, of course, David visited yesterday afternoon. David's lecture this evening is entitled, The Commonwealth of Breath-- Climate and Consciousness in a More-Than-Human World. And it falls into one of the Center's programming threads entitled, Matter and Spirit-- Ecology and the Non-human Turn. Previous speakers in this series have included Eduardo Kohn, this year, Labache Galuppo, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and just last week, Branka Arsic.

So permit me a brief word about this new programming series-- or new, it's two years old-- and then I'll introduce Dr. Abram. Recent work in the humanities and social sciences has generated new interest in the age old question of the relationship between matter and spirit and its relevance for the environmental crisis we now face. On the one hand so-called vibrant materialists, such as the political theorist Jane Bennett, ask us to revise our view of matter as an inert object we manipulate and invite us instead to think of the vibrancy of non-human and allegedly inanimate things, that is their agency and their creativity. This promises to cultivate a different ecological sensibility and perhaps different sorts of political interventions in the environmental crisis.

On the other hand, anthropologists, among others, have revived interest in spirits and their interactions with humans, taking these phenomena seriously, if not always literally, as occasions to widen our notion of agency. Perhaps humans are just one expression of a more widely distributed agency, an agency spread across the full spectrum of this alleged antinomy between matter and spirit. Richard Grusin has called this disinterring of the human, quote, "the non-human turn" from which we have drawn our series title. Could it be that by shifting our focus away from the human to animal's effectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems. We might actually summon an ecological imagination that better safeguards humans precisely by displacing them from the center of all inquiry.

We hazard to guess that such questions, as these, might help us reinvigorate our thinking about religion and ecology. What can these fields of inquiry teach religious studies about cultivating an ecological imagination and a potent activism? And what can religious studies, in turn, contribute to these fields? David Abram is uniquely poised to help us make headway on such questions. He defies traditional academic identities. He's best understood as a cultural ecologist and a geophilosopher.

He's the author of two truly extraordinary books, 2010, Becoming Animal-- An Earthly Cosmology, and in 1996, The Spell of the Sensuous-- Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Described as daring and truly original by Science Magazine and as revolutionary by the LA Times, David's work has helped catalyze the emergence of several new fields, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology. A close student of the traditional ecological knowledge of diverse indigenous peoples, David was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for the reappraisal of animism as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview.

I'd be remiss if I did not thank our very own Mary Balkin-- there you are, Mary-- resident and research fellow here at the Center, who I must confess first brought David's work to my attention. She has led a weekly reading group on animism, concepts, the worldview, its practices, here at the Center. And they are looking forward to hosting David tomorrow evening, that's Wednesday evening.

On Thursday evening, there will be a screening of the new documentary entitled, Becoming Animal, which is about David and his work. And that will be followed by a conversation between David and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, if I'm saying his name correctly, who is the Director of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab. That event will happen on Thursday evening, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM, not here at the Center, but at the Carpenter Center for visual arts on 24 Quincy Street, next to the Harvard Art Museums. And if you're interested, you can find further details about that event on our website or the poster outside the front desk in the courtyard.

David has been the recipient of numerous awards and recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in global health and the environment in Norway. He's the Creative Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics, an organization dedicated to cultural metamorphosis through a rejuvenation of place-based oral culture, the culture of face-to-face and face-to-place storytelling. He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.

Those of you have been paying attention, know that we have a lot of wonderfully talented speakers come through this Center week after week, which you may not know is that I try my best to read something by every one of these visitors. Not just to be a well-informed host, but more so because I am genuinely excited about each of our speakers, which should come as no surprise because I have invited them. But what very few of know, but some of you know, is that David's work has absolutely captivated me these past several months. I confess, it was new to me. I did not know these two books. And they have changed me in these past months, especially his 1996 book, The Spell of the Sensuous, which makes a compelling case that our thought and speech emerge from a deeply sensuous embodied field we share with what he calls the more than human world, the world of animals and plants, but also the world of stones, waters, breath, and wind.

I have been left wondering how my life might have changed had I read this book when it first appeared in 1996, 20 years ago, when I was still a young man. Would I have been able to recognize its brilliance? What I've been able to sit with it's challenging hypotheses about the role of the alphabetical writing system as the principal means by which we vainly attempt to pull ourselves out of this world of teeming life and consciousness, and pretend that we float above it as if we were the Earth's great exception.

I don't know how I would have reacted to this book. But I do know that his writings have fired my imagination in a way that very little else has in the last year or more. David, thank you so much for joining us. Mary, Terry, thank you for helping bring David into my world, and now into ours. Please join me in welcoming David to the Center.

DAVID ABRAM: Wow. Thanks so much. And yes, first, thanks for being here. A big and warm thank you to Mary Balkin for her interest in these matters and for opening the door to bring me here. Huge thank you as well to Terry Tempest for her immense heart and luminous intellect and for her amazing class with whom I spent quite a mind-altering three hours yesterday, and to Ariella Ruth Goldberg for all her care and arranging things, and to Charlie Marshall Stang for making this visit possible

Charlie asked me to come and speak as he just said on this theme of Matter and Spirit, Ecology and The Non-human Turn. So I decided to talk on a dimension of our world that is both matter and spirit inseparably, the atmosphere or what I'm calling the commonwealth of breath. It's a dimension that is, at once, uttermost transcendence because we cannot see it. We cannot grasp it. We try vainly to map it. But it's utterly enigmatic, utterly mysterious, utterly resistant to every attempt that we may engage in to objectify it. But it is a dimension that is, at once, utterly transcendent and uttermost eminence because it is all around us, up against us, inside our nostrils even circulating within our bodies.

But let me introduce myself. I'm a cultural ecologist and a geophilosopher, that is someone who philosophizes under the influence of the more-than-human Earth. My particular fascination is with the ecology of sensory experience, how the activity of our eyes, of our ears, of our skin, and our nostrils binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem. But I'm just as interested in the ecology of language, how what we say so profoundly influences what we see, or what we hear, or even taste out of the Earth around us. Because I'm convinced that there are ways of speaking that many of us have inherited that work to frustrate and inhibit the spontaneous rapport between our animal senses and the animate land around us. But I'm just as convinced that there are other ways of wielding our words that can open our senses, encourage and enhance that spontaneous reciprocity between our body and the flesh of the living earth around us.

Here's a simple example, mentioned this in Terry's class yesterday. We know that we live on the Earth, we say, here on Earth, this is happening or that's happening. Or we were placed on Earth for this reason or for that reason. Or on the face of the Earth, this is what's coming down right now. The main environmental radio program on NPR is called Living on Earth, but come on now, really? Do we really live on the Earth?

Sometimes, when I'm teaching I take my students out of doors. And I point up at the clouds. And the clouds are just sort of drifting. If it's in New Mexico, there's usually a few clouds. But they're just lollygagging up there, maybe drifting toward the North slowly. And I point out that, look, we know, from hearsay or because we've studied it, that the Earth is spinning very rapidly like a dervish around its axis toward the East at 1,000 miles an hour and more around its axis, spinning toward the East. So which way is East here? Is that East? That way? Yeah.

So shouldn't we, I ask them, see those clouds all just whipping off toward the West if the Earth is spinning so rapidly? Those clouds are fairly close, but shouldn't we just see them charging off toward the West? But we don't, they're just hanging out, relaxing it seems, or streaming a bit toward the South. And I say, why?

And after a moment, some perspicacious student usually says, well, because the clouds are accompanying the Earth as it spins, which is of course, right. Because the clouds are a part of the Earth, held aloft by this ocean of air in which we're embedded as thoroughly as fish are immersed in the sea. That is to say that's Earth up there. When we're gazing up at the clouds, we're looking up at another layer of the Earth. And hence, we don't live on the Earth. We live "in" the Earth, immersed in its depths, down here in the thick of this medium of air.

We live not on, but in the Earth-- or in the "Eairth." As I'm writing it now, I'm actually spelling it a little differently. I'm taking the letter "I" And inserting it in the name Earth, as if the "I"-- excuse me, I told you I'm fascinated with language and words and even the way words look. But that letter that we use, that upright slash to indicate the self as if it is a pictogram of the spine of this animal who spent so much of its history on its four legs walking around, every now and then balancing, off here, looking around and back on its force until, after balancing here and learning to move a bit before, well, we got good enough to actually start walking around on our hind legs as if the "I" is just a pictogram of the upright spine of the human animal, "I."

And to take out letter "I" place it within the name Earth-- so spelling it E-A-I-R-T-H-- in order to say that I am in the air, A-I-R. And the air is entirely a part of the Eairth, E-A-I-R-T-H, "Eairth," which sounds vaguely Scottish, which is a good thing I think. But really, we don't notice this. We don't speak of the air between two persons who are sitting close to one another. We just speak of the space between them.

We don't speak of the air between myself and a nearby tree. We just speak of the space between us. How much space is there between me and the wall? We don't ask how much air is between me and the wall. It's empty space. It's empty. It's just an absence of stuff, a void. Without any feeling or meaning, it's a void. And hence, a perfect place to throw whatever we hope to avoid. The perfect dump site for the unwanted products of our industries, all those byproducts, for the noxious brew of chemicals exhaled from the stacks of our factories and power plants and refineries, and the stinging exhaust belching forth from our fossil fuel vehicles, spewing from automobiles and airplanes cruise ships and tugboats and giant tankers, lugging thick tar sands, crude, to be processed in foreign ports. Even the most opaque acrid smoke billowing out of the pipes will dissipate and disperse, always and ultimately dissolving into the invisible. It's gone out of sight, out of mind. Out of sight, out, out of mind.

Well, mind or consciousness is a hopelessly amorphous and ephemeral phenomenon, one that's mighty tough to pin down. Gobs and gobs of scientific papers and books have been published in recent years trying to account for the emergence of awareness or to explain how consciousness is constituted within the brain. Many of these works are weirdly at odds with one another because there exists no clear agreement as to just what this enigma that we call consciousness actually is. Part of the difficulty stems from the intransigence of old notions. In particular our age old assumption that mind is a uniquely human property, an utterly intangible substance that resides somewhere inside each of us, a problematic assumption.

Given the blithe obliviousness with which we shove other species over the brink of extinction and our ready capacity to wreak havoc upon ecosystems utterly essential to our own flourishing, it might be that a bit of humility is in order. We may not be quite as conscious as we've assumed. At this broken moment in the human story, when the continued survival not only of our kind but of much of our world is in question, it might be that a fresh conception or image of mind is in order, an image that has a sort of wisdom built right into it.

Well, curiously, our experience of awareness, this amorphous and ephemeral power, has a lot in common with our felt experience of the Earth's atmosphere. Consider the air, this light-filled and fluid element in which you're now immersed with its agitations, and its calms, its storms, and its subsidence. Consider the unseen currents drifting between the soils and the scudding clouds and circulating among us wherever we find ourselves, pouring in through the doors and eddying along these walls, streaming into your nostrils, and circulating within you as well. Like the quality of awareness, the fluid air constantly informs us. And yet, it's exceedingly difficult to catch sight of. We glimpse the air only indirectly, as it bends the branches of a birch tree or slants the rain or steals a page from our fingers and sends it flapping down the street.

We drink the air ceaselessly, alchemizing it within our flesh and replenishing it with every outbreath, yet seem unable to fully bring it to our attention. Itself invisible, the atmosphere is that through which we see everything else. Much as consciousness, which we cannot see or grasp is that through which we encounter all other phenomena. We are unable to step apart from consciousness in order to examine it objectively because wherever we step, it's already there.

Well, mind, in this sense, is very much like a medium in which we are corporally situated. And from which, we're simply unable to extricate ourselves without ceasing to exist. Everything we know, our sense of ourselves, is conditioned by this atmosphere. We are intimately acquainted with its character endlessly transformed by its influence upon us. And yet, we're unable to characterize this medium from outside. We are composed of this curious element, permeated by it, and hence can take no real distance from it.

To acknowledge this affinity between air and awareness is to allow this curious possibility that the awareness that stirs within each of us is continuous with the wider awareness that moves around us. Twisting the grasses and lofting the crows, each organism partakes of this awareness from its own unique angle or situation within it, imbibing it through our nostrils or through the stomata, in our leaves, altering its chemistry and qualities within us before we breathe it back into the surrounding world. Is consciousness really the special possession of our species? Or is it rather a property of the breathing biosphere, a quality in which we, along with the woodpeckers and the spreading weeds, all participate?

Perhaps the apparent interiority we ascribe to the mind has less to do with a separate consciousness located somewhere inside me and another entirely separate and distinct consciousness that sits inside you. And more to do with the intuition that we are both situated inside it, a recognition that we are carnally immersed in an awareness that is not properly speaking ours, but is rather the Earth's.

DAVID ABRAM: Among the Inuit and Yup'ik peoples inhabiting the circumpolar Arctic, the enigma is named Sila. There are variants in local dialects hila, hla, shla, sla, tla, all from Sila. They all voice the same mystery most commonly called Sila, the wind mind of the world, source of all breath. Sila is the elemental wonder of the air and of the winds that stir and sometimes surge within a storm and mist and every other kind of weather, but also, awareness, consciousness.

Silarjuag, that which has no creator, constant flux and change, mind at large. Silatuniq, wisdom. Both from Sila, the intelligence of the air, the mind of the cycling seasons, and the weather. The great indweller in the air, Sila is the source of all breath, of all life, of all awareness, awe-airness, wind mind.

In the early 1920s, an old Inuit angakkuq or shaman named Najagneq spoke in conversation with the Danish Explorer Knud Rasmussen. His words were translated by Rasmussen into Danish and then by others into English. Najagneq spoke of, quote, "A power that we call Sila that cannot be explained in simple words. A great spirit sustaining the world and the weather and all life on Earth, a spirit so mighty that its speech to humankind is not through common words but through storms and snow and rainfall and the fury of the sea, all the forces of nature that humans fear.

But it has also another means of utterance through sunlight and calm seas and through small children innocently at play, understanding nothing. Children hear a soft and gentle voice almost like that of a woman. It comes to them in a mysterious way but so gently that they're not afraid. They only hear that some danger threatens.

When times are good, Sila has nothing to say to humankind but withdraws into its endless nothingness, where it remains as long as people do not abuse life and act with respect toward the animals that are their food. No one has ever seen Sila, its place is a mystery. At once intimately among us and unspeakably far away," unquote.

Rasmussen's written records and many more recent ethnographies make evident the importance for the Inuit as well of another more intimate power, the breath soul or inua that indwells each living being, providing life and awareness to humans, animals, and plants. A person's breath soul, however, is simply her part of the wider mind of the wind since Sila, the sensibility and the air subsumes all individual inua or breath souls within itself.

Quote, "Sila is the life-giving element which unfolds all the world and invests all living organisms. Sila is the word for air. Without air, there's no life. Air is in all people and all creatures. Every individual is said to have as part of his or her soul, the life force, the life-giving spirit, which is part of the whole animating force, Silap Inua, the indweller in the wind. This is, of course, something which never dies. Air and the life-giving force go on indefinitely. And so then does the soul of a human being. When the air passes out of the body at the moment of physical death, it is simply the passing of the soul back into its original matrix," unquote.

Well, this old circumpolar understanding neatly unties the modern philosophical not conventionally known as the mind-body problem. The puzzle of how a purely immaterial mind or consciousness interacts with or is generated by a thoroughly material flesh. To the Inuit, consciousness may be invisible and ineffable but it is hardly immaterial. It is rather the sentience of the unseen but nonetheless palpable element in which we participate with the whole of our breathing bodies.

The sun infused air is our common medium, a broad intelligence that we share with the other animals and the plants and the forested mountains, and yet, each of us engages it with the particularities of our own flesh. And since your body is different from mine in ever so many ways, so your experience of this encompassing awareness, your interface with the common medium is necessarily richly different from mine.

The still more contrasting experience of a praying mantis or a pileated woodpecker or of a field of wild lupins, for that matter, are as curiously different from our experience as their bodies are different from ours. Each being's awareness is unique, to be sure, but this is not because an autonomous mind is held inside its particular body or brain, rather each engages the common awareness from its own extraordinary angle through its particular senses according to the capacities of its flesh.

Well, such an elegant conception, if taken seriously, opens a range of previously unsuspected insights into the contemporary climate predicament. But this perspective, at once weirdly new and startlingly old, is hardly unique to the indigenous traditions of the far North. After a long summer spent teaching and learning on the Northwest coast of North America, I've just, when I'm writing this, returned to my home in the Southwest desert, reacquainting myself with the sunset hues of sandstone and the sense of juniper and sage.

Here in the desert Southwest, there flourish an array of native cultures speaking languages from at least five unrelated language families. Each of which practices its own intensely respectful relation to the unseen atmosphere. For instance, for the Puebloan peoples, around where I live in northern New Mexico, they too speak of the breath soul which for them is a vaporous air that enters the body with its first breath as the baby comes out of the mother and gulps [INHALES] that first breath, the presence of that spirit enters into it.

And at death, [EXHALES] the breath soul journeys out of the body and across the land to the village of the kachinas, which is usually situated just beyond the horizon or under a lake that's beyond the horizon. It's different for different pueblos or native villages in the Southwest. But they all have, even though they speak very different languages, this understanding of the kachinas, which are the spirit ancestors who live and go about their lives there in their own villages.

But they return to the pueblo, to the village of the living, whenever they're being danced, whenever people put on those kachina masks, as some of you have seen. As soon as one wears such a mask, that spirit ancestor returns to the village and takes possession of that person, who then is dancing as that power, as that ancestor on the plaza, and the dances are happening regularly where I live. And you can feel the gods, the spirits, the powers descend on the plaza and dance. It's quite intense.

But the kachinas or spirit ancestors also return to the pueblos whenever they choose, not just when they're being danced. They return to the pueblo as long as people in the pueblo are honoring them with prayers, with propitiations. And they return to the pueblo, how? As clouds manifesting out of the fathomless blue, they gather.

And when enough of them gather, they carry an abundance of rain, which then is released. And the rain waters the ground, the desert earth, and fertilizes the soil from which the corn grows, which feeds the living. But clouds, where I live, are the ancestors returning to the village. And this is very palpable and very real.

I was present for one amazing dance shalako at Zuni Pueblo when there were a group of young people on the plaza and I overheard them speaking of one cloud, because I was looking up at it, it was just a single cloud drifting alone in this utterly clear sky, and some of the people were pointing up at it. And I went close.

The kids were actually speaking in English and one was saying, "That's got to be Philip. That's grandpa Philip. He never comes to dances. He never came to our ceremonies. He's just he's always just on his own," and so, kind of worthless. But it's when they gather en masse that they bring rain.

Just a little further West is the Navajo Nation, the Dene people as they call themselves. Dene just means the people. For the Dene, there most cosmological, almost monotheistic power is something they call nilch'i or the holy wind as it's translated. Holy wind is the whole body of the air, including the blue of the sky and the air when it is moving and when it is still. And the holy wind gives all things life and breath and awareness.

It's holy because you can't see it. You see it only indirectly. But it's an extraordinary mystery that envelops you when you step into the Navajo homeland. They speak of the wind within one as well. And the earliest anthropologists who were Christian missionaries understood the wind within one as akin to the Christian notion of the personal spirit but they missed that the wind within one is entirely continuous with the wind all around one.

Holy wind. Now you can't see it directly but you see it lofting the clouds. You see it lifting birds aloft. You see it bending the grasses and branches of trees. And you see that you cannot think a single thought without continually imbibing this invisible stuff. So how do we know that our thoughts are not being thunk, as it were, by the wind?

They say you see it by the traces it leaves. It leaves this little spiraling patterns wherever it goes. So whenever you see a spiral in the world, you know that holy wind or nilch'i has been there. So the spiraling patterns in our fingertips that we call our finger prints are where 10 little winds entered into our fingertips when we were born.

And the spiraling patterns in our toe tips are where 10 little winds entered into our toes when we were born. And the winds in our toes hold us to the ground and the winds in our fingers hold us to the sky. And that's why we don't fall down [INAUDIBLE].

But they say look you also have these spirals in the folds of your ears. These vaguely spiraling pattern here, our ear folds, and that's how we know that there are two little winds hanging out, one inside each of your ears. Wind's children they call them. And when you're thinking thoughts, when you hear that roof brain chatter of words within your head, well, the Navajo elders say that's just wind's children talking to you from inside your ears.

So our thoughts are being funk not by us, but by the wind because these wind's children are just the messenger winds of the winds of the four directions, who themselves are subsidiaries of the big body of nilch'i, the holy wind. So this is a notion of mind or consciousness way different from that to which most of us were educated.

A sense of mind not as that which separates us, two-leggeds, from everything else in the landscape but precisely as what connects us to every other being in the terrain. Mind as wind. And this notion of wind mind can seem very weird to us, very strange to us raised in the West, until we notice the evidence in our own words.

Like our word "spirit" which, of course, comes from the very same root as the word "respiration," the Latin word "spiritus," which originally means a breath or a gust of wind. Or the word "psyche" from which we get psychology and psychiatry or ecopsychology, comes from this old Greek word "psykhe." The verb "psykhen" meant to breathe or to blow like the wind. A psyche or a psykhe was a gust of wind or a breath of air.

Or the Latin word for the soul, "anima" from which we get animal, an unsouled being. Or unanimous, being of one mind or one soul. Anima, where does that come from? Actually from an older Greek word "anemos," which means wind. Even such a respectable scientific term as atmosphere, so much used today. Where does that come from? Anyone know?

Cognate with the Sanskrit word "atman," for the soul. The Indo-European root "atmos" originally meant the soul which is the air, the air which is the soul. In fact, if you take the words for soul or mind or spirit in any language and trace them back to their oral origin, you'll discover that at least one of those words names the air or the wind as the very body of that mystery we call mind.

But strange the word "psyche" then, why all of these oral traditions have such a rich sense of air, which for us has become just sort of empty space. Why? Because I want to suggest these are oral traditions. In oral cultures, human language is primarily speaking. It's not a visible thing you can look at on a page. It's what I'm doing up here. It's speaking, and speech is nothing other than shaped breath.

That is, you may have noticed or you may not have noticed, that we only speak when we're breathing out. That is we speak only by imbibing some of these invisible stuff, and then breathing it out. And as we breathe it out, we shape it with our lips and our teeth and our palate, let it vibrate a couple folds in our throat, and we breathe it out into the world. We never speak on the inbreath because it doesn't sound good.

It's very hard to speak on the inbreath but on the outbreath, that's what we shape with our mouth and our tongue and we speak. And so it is assumed that it is the breath that is carrying my words to your ears or your words to my ears. So the air is the implicit intermediary in all communication. The air is the very medium of meaning. It is the very place of the spirits. It is the place where your ancestors voices linger after they've passed on, the air.

Every oral culture knows this inside out. So our word "psyche" means the breath or the wind. That is to say this is the psyche. It's not something inside us but rather we are inside it. It seems to me that this is the biggest difference between oral cultures, indigenous cultures, generally. When we speak of indigenous native cultures, we're speaking, by and large, of traditionally oral cultures.

And the difference between such cultures and literate alphabetized cultures like our own, well, all of the fluid creativity that we associate with the mind and tend to think of as residing inside each of our heads, such that I've got a little mind inside me and you have a little mind inside you and we get to argue about whether the squirrel has a little mind inside it.

All of that lucid creativity and imaginative richness that we think of as inside our heads is for traditionally oral peoples felt to be out here, and we are all bodily immersed within it, within a mind that is not ours but is rather the Earth because the psyche is nothing other than the fluid air, the atmosphere of this planet.

But let me try and flesh this out a little bit. What would it feel like to think of the mind or the psyche in this matter? Well, think of what we call the weather. Very changeable, very different in different places. I'd like to suggest that changes in the weather are really changes in the collective mind of a place, not that they directly transform the thinking of every being that dwells within that land but they transform the background against which our thoughts unfold.

Let me give you a few examples. I've got a bunch of these. I'm just going to plug it, like three. Torpor. During the summer near the coast, when I sometimes wakes to a day that seems like any other although as one goes through the motions of dressing and preparing breakfast, one notices one's thoughts lagging behind as though they've yet to fully separate themselves from the state of sleep.

A slowness attends all one's cogitations. The newspaper today seems written with less zip, reporting the same old thing with the same stale phrases. And when you put it aside, you wonder if a minute's rest on the couch would be in order before tackling the day's work. The immediate tasks to be accomplished are, after all, kind of vague and unfocused. It's difficult to remember just what they are.

Only upon stepping outside and surveying the world from your stoop does the material cause of this mental lethargy become apparent because the leafy trees, the electric wires, and the other houses are all bathed in a humid atmosphere that renders their outlines fuzzy and imprecise while the mountains that usually rise from the far edge of town have dissolved or are wholly shrouded somehow in the moisture thick air.

There's no cloud to be seen in the washed-out sky, only the two big sun hovering in the East, sweating like a spent tennis ball mouthed by too many dogs. It's dull heat presses in from every direction. Lucidity. Then there are those rare days, not entirely unknown in any region of the planet, that dawn with a clarity that muscles its way into every home and office lending a crispness and cogency to almost every thought.

One feels uncommonly good on such days and others do too. Deliberations move forward with unaccustomed ease. Ambiguities resolve themselves or render themselves more explicit. The choice is more defined and clear cut. There's a delicious radiance that seems to come from the things themselves, from even the tables and the plush rug. And when we step outside, we can taste it in the air and the way a few fluffed clouds rest almost motionless in the crystal lens of the sky.

And how far our vision travels on such days. When we climb to the top of the street, we can see clear to the mountains that rise from the plane in the neighboring state. Long term goals abruptly become evident. Possibilities far in the future seem more accessible, lending perspective to the present. Hence, planning goes more smoothly. Without with, a market absence of the usual friction. No sweat.

Although, to be sure, we're not always in sync with such felicitous weather, with the strangely clarified transparents that lifts the weight of the whole suburb on such unpredictable days or that wraps the Aspen branches outside my cabin with such a pellucid and formfitting cloak of blue. Sometimes we're still carrying the strains and stresses of recent weeks, struggles that followed us into our dreams and now cling to our face and our feet, or perhaps we're still in the dank doldrums due to the wreck of a relationship we had trusted our hearts to.

These are the worst days for depression when everyone else we meet moved so smoothly through the world. Even if we're off on our own, well away from the human hubbub, the despondence can be darker on such days when it seems the stones and the singing sky and the blades of grass are all tuned to another frequency. There's an insistent and eager harmonious to things. An ease that we sense on the periphery. The hillside itself humming with pleasure for a whole afternoon. Yet, the mood cannot penetrate through the thick pellicle of our pain.

The mismatch of the world with our own traumatized state feels distressing, even terrifying, shoving us deeper into the pit. Of course, I'm writing of these earthly elements or moods from an entirely human perspective. In fact, I'm writing from the subjective perspective of a single human creature, me. Nonetheless, I write with the knowledge that there can't help but be some overlap between my direct visceral experience and the felt experience of other persons whose senses, after all, have a lot in common with my own.

Further, I've confidence that my bodily experience is a variation, albeit in many cases, a very distant variation of what other non-human bodies may experience in the same locale in that season at a similar moment of the day or night.

For not only are our bodies kindred, all mammals, for instance, sharing a common ancestry, but also we are, all of us, at the present moment, interdependent constituents of a common biosphere, each of us experiencing it from our own angle and with our own specific capabilities, yet, nonetheless, all participant in the round life of the Earth, and hence, subject to the same large scale flows rhythms, and tensions that move across that wider life.

The world we inhabit is not in this sense a determinable set of objective processes. It is our larger flesh, a densely intertwined and improvisational tissue of experience. It is a sensitive sphere suspended in the solar wind around field of sentience sustained by the relationships between the myriad lives and sensibilities that compose it.

We come to know more of this sphere not by detaching ourselves from our felt experience but by inhabiting our bodily experience all the more richly and wakefully, feeling our way into deeper contact with other experiencing bodies, and hence, with the wild intercorporeal life of the Earth itself.

Stillness. The computer keys rise and fall beneath my fingers, letters arranging themselves on the screen as I list the matters I must attend to in the next days. Drop off a clutch of letters at the post office, compose a decent lecture for the conference on Thursday, clean the stove in the oven, and since we're having guests, I'd better gather up this year's receipts from the various boxes and baskets and standalone piles where I've tossed them and maybe organize them in a respectable fashion.

The guests are my parents. They're arriving Wednesday, tomorrow, to spend time with their two grandkids. Tomorrow. How exactly do I expect to find time to craft a half decent lecture for that conference? I'll have to come up with some sort of outline and then just wing it. Meanwhile, my partner's been scowling at me all day because I forgot to fix the vacuum cleaner last week, as if I have any idea how to even take that gizmo apart.

When I fixed it last year it was sheer luck. The bulky part fell down the stairs when I was trying to pry it open, and then miraculously started working like new. So all of a sudden, she decided I'm a mechanical wizard. Not that I don't enjoy the respect, but sooner or later, she'll discover I'm a quack, the last person one should trust with a tool more complicated than a shoehorn.

Anyway, I have to remember-- remember that the voice I reached at the power company said they'll indeed turn off the gas and electric if I don't get a check to them by Wednesday. Tomorrow. Too late to send it by mail. Maybe I can swing by there on the way to Hannah's dental appointment. After the dentist, we'll have to head straight to the airport to pick up my folks.

But why in Earth's name is she going to the dentist again? What kind of scam are these doctors running? If my daughter's teeth weren't perfectly fine, she couldn't bite her friend Fin so effectively. And if she comes home with one more coloring book from the waiting room with all those grinning animal faces proclaiming how important it is to get to the dentist every six months, I'm going to sue the dentist for corrupting minors. Why does he need so many visits anyway? Doesn't he have any friends?

As the overwhelm hits, I feel a shot of acid in my stomach and feel it register too as a fleeting wince on my face. Not good. This upcoming lecture has me on edge for some reason. Maybe because it's in my home town for once and so various acquaintances will be there, expecting something dazzling. Christ.

Something catches my peripheral vision and I turned toward the window, I feel my eyes widen in surprise. Snowflakes. A great crowd of snowflakes floating down, a deep thicket of slowly tumbling white. How long has this been happening? I stand and stare for a few moments, then pull on a sweater, and stepped out the door into a landscape transformed as if by a spell.

My steps make no sound. The white blanket already plush on the ground and layered in tufts upon the juniper and pine branches as flakes drift down like leucine stars. Hundreds of them swerve into my face, melting cold against my skin as I walk slowly through a world utterly transfigured by this silent grace cascading through every part of the space around me.

The surge and press of the week's worries have somehow vanished. When I try to call those concerns back to mind, I simply cannot find them behind the teeming multitude of slowly falling flakes. Past and future have dissolved and I am held in the white eternity of a moment so beautiful, it melts all my words. All weight has lifted.

The innumerable downward trajectories have convinced my senses that I am floating, or rather rising slowly upward and the ground itself rising beneath me. The earth and I ascending weightless through space. A sound, the flutter of a bird's wings and a small explosion of snow from a branch that bird launched from. Then just silence. Not silence as an absence of sound but as a fullness, as the very sound 10,000 snowflakes make as they meet the ground. A thick silence muffling the whole valley and, for all I know, the whole cosmos.

I cannot imagine that any bird, any squirrel, any coyote or hare is not similarly held in the visible trance of this slowly cascading silence. The clumps on the branches deepen. The snow falls through the night. The porch light illuminating a charmed space through which powder floats steadily down. I turn it off before heading to bed, then stepped outside to inhale the darkness.

Now, even the house and the truck asleep in the driveway have fallen under the spell. By morning, the snowfall has stopped. Yet, the enchantment holds. When I stepped outside, I'd snap my boots into my skis, there is a soft stillness everywhere. I glide between the trees and onto the dirt road, whose countless ruts have disappeared. Unbroken goodness extends from the tips of my skis in every direction. There is a hushed purity to the world and to awareness itself as I float across the snowy fields.

The dentist will wait and the power company will get its check when the roads are clear, whether today or tomorrow. Thursday's lecture is forming itself easily as I glide over the white expanse, my body writing its smooth script across the clean, unmarked pages. Now and then, a hilum releases its too heavy mound of snow and a spray of powder drifts down in sheets, littering, scintillating, then vanishing into the clarified air.

OK, I'm going to quit those examples. There. And just bring this around to where we started. Instead of just bringing forth various indigenous place-based cultures in a way that might make you think I'm sort of a Native American wannabe, here I want to speak a bit from my own tribal and indigenous culture, which is the Hebrew culture, the Jewish tradition.

We, too, have a word that names the wind and the spirit inseparably. The word is "ruah." Many of you, I'm sure, know this. This word "ruah," it's sometimes translated as rushing spirit. It's a very, very sacred notion in the Jewish tradition because it is felt to be the very presence of the Divine in the body's world, the wind, the rushing spirit.

It is sacred and uncommonly so because of its invisibility. But it's there in the very first sentence of the Hebrew Bible, the world was without form and void and a wind of God moved over the waters. A ruah of God moved over the waters. The presence of the Divine in the bodies world. It is not the most sacred word in the Jewish tradition. That would be the four letter name of God, what the Greeks called the Tetragrammaton.

The four letters-- Y, H, W, H, or in Hebrew, yod, hey, vav, hey. And we've all heard this pronounced Yahweh. But that's quite illegitimate, actually, because, well, we don't know how it's pronounced. Why don't we know? Because this term is so sacred, which is to say it's so secret, secret and sacred being basically the same word, that we seem to have forgotten how to say it. It is to be spoken only in the most rare of moments, only when deeply needed.

If one thinks about this term, it's quite strange. The reason we don't know how to pronounce it is because, well, there are no vowels in the name. It's just YHWH. Why are there no vowels in the name? Well, it's interesting. There are no vowels in the name because the vowels you see are the breath sounds.

The consonants buh, kah, duh, wha, are the shapes we give to the breath as it moves through the mouth. But the vowels a, e, i, o, u, are the sounds made by the unimpeded breath as it moves through the mouth. As breath, the vowels are inseparable from the ruah, from the rushing spirit, from the very presence of the Divine here in this earthly world.

You cannot make a visible representation of the invisible breath, of the wind, of the air. And so we didn't do it. It's not just the name that has no vowels in it, the whole Hebrew writing system is just consonants, there's no vowels written in a traditional Hebrew script or text. So when you read like the Torah scroll at the synagogue, it's just consonants on the scroll, on the parchment, and you have to lend your breath to those bones on the page to make them come alive and begin to speak. And the way you sing up the text, the vowels you choose to add can alter the meaning continually.

So in our tradition, it's understood that the Torah, that scripture is inherently plurivocal, omnivocal. There is no one fundamental meaning of the text. It speaks with a thousand, a million different meanings, and we have to grapple and struggle with Torah every generation in order to see what it wants to speak in this time, in this season.

So we wrote the bones but we have to add our breath to those bones to make them stand up and begin to speak. It's like if you were reading a text you came upon, the consonant R and the consonant D and you could pronounce it as rude or as road or as ride or as read or as read. And the way you pronounce it will alter the meaning of the next words, the next combination of letters that you come upon. So it's quite magical.

This is why, as many of you know, if you've ever been to a Passover Seder, as it's coming up very soon, or to a Shabbat meal in a Jewish household, Judaism is a culture of argument. We just argue about everything. No, the text says this. No, but rabbi so-and-so said that yes. But rabbi so-and-so said he was completely wrong. It's just it's all arguments because why? Because we didn't write down the vowels so nobody knows what it says. But it's not a joke. This is real. This is true.

The greatest magician in the Jewish tradition, the great mystic, the Baal Shem Tov, which means the master of the good name, founder of the Hasidic tradition. Master of the good name, not because he had a good name but because he was a master at using the four-letter name. Oh God, it worked magic. That name is taken to be so magical, so good.

What's the mystery there? If we sit with the letters that composed the four-letter name of God, like a good Kabbalist meditating upon those letters for a long time. It may suddenly strike you, something strange in those letters, that they are the most breath-like consonants. Yes, they're consonants but it's YHWH.

It's basically, yah, ha, wha, and then the ha repeats itself. And if you meditate on that for another year and three days, it may suddenly hit you, like a fist out of the blue, that, of course, there is a magic to the pronunciation of this name. And that rightly spoken, it probably sounds nothing like the way we've heard it.

But rightly spoken, it probably sounds something like this. Yah, ha, wha, ha, yah, ha, wha, ha, yah, ha, wha, ha, wha, ha, wha, ha, yah, ha. At the most holy name of the divine in the Western tradition, is the name we all speak whenever we're conscious of our breathing. This rocking in and out of ourselves that binds the invisible depths within us to the lungs of a swallow swooping past and to the oak trees and the soils and the oceans. We are of one spirit with the land, with mind, with the Earth really.

So I'll end just with this simple question, what is climate change, if not the simple consequence of forgetting the sacredness of the invisible air, of the atmosphere, of the medium in which we're immersed, treating it as an open sewer, as this perfectly convenient dump site to toss all the unwanted byproducts of our industries?

Out of sight, out of mind. Everything dissipating as smoke. Out of sight, out of mind. But for our oral ancestors and for the Indigenous ones among us, that which dissipates as smoke and dissolves into the unseen air is by that very gesture entering into the mind, wind mind of the world, from whence we all drink steadily.

This air, this breath, born of the interbreeding of all of us animals. What we breathe out, all these plants, all those trees are breathing in. And what the plants breathe out, all of us animals breathe in. Talk of reciprocity. Magic. All, us, beings interbreeding with one another percolates into existence this mystery, this atmosphere, this ruah, this rushing spirit. The Commonwealth of Breath. Thanks.

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