June 8, 2012. Blog #20

Who knows where the wind blows, or from whence it comes?

This morning I woke to the sound of the wind howling, whistling, and rushing down from the mountains from the north of Crete, out to the Libyan Sea. I looked out to see trees, bushes, and flowers frantically bending and waving, pushed down and tossed, restlessly turning, trying to return upright against the vast turbulent ocean of air, an irresistible current of wind, 30-40 mph, with frequent gusts to 50-60 mph. The flowers bob and bow in the invisible current.

“A Very Blustery Day, Winnie the Pooh. ( mildly edited)

Now one fine day the east wind traded places with the west wind, and that’s turned things a bit all through the Hundred Acre Wood. Now, on this blustery day Pooh decided to visit his thoughtful spot…… (pooh) Yes, and on that day, I made up a little hum.
And it hummed something like this:
Humdum ditty dum
Hum dum dum
Oh, the wind is lashing lustily
Ad the trees are thrashing thrustily
And the leaves are rustling gustily
So it’s rather safe to say
That it seems that it may turn out to be…….
Looks like a rather blustery day, today.

(Gopher) If I was you I’d think about skeeddaddling out of here.
(Pooh) Why?
(Gopher) Cause its wind’s day.
(Pooh) Windsday? Oh, I think I shall wish everyone a happy Windsday, and I shall begin with my dear friend Piglet…….”

( and so it goes in the hundred acre wood)

Air, the second element, roared to announce itself this morning, invisible, odorless, tasteless, silent except where it meets resistance. Air makes itself known by its forceful presence or gentle touch, lethal circling tornado, vast hurricane on the sea.
Air also reveals itself by what it carries, scents, sounds, water in the form of evaporation or precipitation. Dust, sand, pollen, volcanic ash, smoke, industrial pollutants, flying birds and insects, balloons and aircraft, radio, TV, and cellular waves.

Of what is air made? Our blended, buffering, envelope of atmosphere is made of nitrogen N2=78.084%, O2= 20.95%, argon=0.934%, CO2=0.036% in addition to a number of trace gases, neon, helium, methane, hydrogen, Nitrous oxide, and ozone. Water vapor H2O, makes up 1-4% of the atmosphere. ( interesting that CO2 makes up such a little amount of the atmosphere, 0.036%. At such a small amount, it is easier to understand how all of the CO2 that comes from burning fossil fuel could alter the balance. Our precious atmosphere protects us from solar radiation and spreads the sun’s heat evenly around our fair planet. Meteors burn up as they pass through the air, falling and pulled by invisible gravity to the earth. This gentle but turbulent envelope or air thins gradually until it merges into the vacuum of space.

I grew up in Oklahoma, where the “wind comes sweeping down the plain”. My home town was in the green foothills of the Ozark Mountains, which slowly gave way to the vast open great plains. There, the wind rarely ceases. Born in 1950, I grew up hearing about the dreadful “dust bowl” days, of the 30s and 40s. In nearby fields were abandoned homes, whose owners had fled west from the drought, famine, and choking, arid dust storms, which denuded the once fertile soil of the plains. Many thousands of people were driven starving from their homes and farms by this relentless wind.

I remember playing on the front porch, when I was about 7 years old, watching as a tornado approached, seeing the black funnel cloud perhaps 3-5 miles away. My senses remember the charged feeling in the air, hair on arms tingled and smell of ozone and rain. I can still see the greenish gray clouds rippling and writhing overhead, looking exactly like the ocean in a storm. The color of the air was a muted greenish color, all the birds quiet, insects silent as a breathless waiting. But every year, in May-June, and a bit of July was tornado season. Another year, when I was about 6 years old, I was taking a bath. My mom was worried more than usual as a tornado was within a mile or two and heading in our direction. The lightening flashed repeatedly, the atmosphere electrically charged, hairs standing on end, a remarkable darkness for summer around 6:30 PM.
My mother made me get out of the bathtub, wrapped in a towel and still wet. She bundled my sister and I out into the car, inside the garage, to wait out the tornado, in case it descended on our house. It passed close but did little damage to our neighborhood. People a few blocks away were not so lucky.

I remember the hot blast furnace like wind that came out of the desert in southern California called the “Santa Ana” winds. When I was stationed in San Diego, in the Navy, I remember how lips would crack, noses would bleed, skin dry up, and irritability struck much of the populace. There is a legendary Scirocco wind that comes out of the Sahara and affects large areas of southern Europe with similar, more severe effects.

Recently, when I was in Ireland, I hiked up a mountain peak called the Slieveleige, that plunges in a cliff face, 3,000 feet down to the crashing Atlantic surf. On the trail, there were several areas where wind gusts could blow you off the cliff, if you were a child, or not wary. The strong steady north wind blew as a constant presence on the Isle of Iona, Scotland, and also out of the Scottish Highlands down to the Monastery at Dighty, Stirling, Scotland, chilling me even in bright sunlight.

Air of course is also beneficial, vital for life. There is 14.6 pounds per square inch of air pressure at sea level, perfectly balanced with our internal body pressure. Fires cannot burn without oxygen, and wind can whip a forest or grass fire into a raging firestorm of incredible destructive power. Our own oxidative metabolism that is responsible for every inner or outer movement or operation of body tissue is continuous. Without air, we humans can only live 4-6 minutes without dying or suffering severe brain damage. As we inhale, our diaphragm acts like a bellows, sucking in air from outside our bodies. The air moves into our mouth and nose, down our throat, past our voice box, and through our windpipe, down into the bronchial tubes, branching into bronchioles, and then into tiny alveoli, lined with capillaries, where the blood flows by the alveolar membrane, releasing its waste product of metabolism, CO2, and picking up O2 onto the hemoglobin molecules of the blood. The blood then carries O2 to every living cell in the body, fueling the oxidation of glucose, turning it into heat and energy of cellular activity, through a complex series of chemical reactions, Krebbs Cycle and others.

Of course, we couldn’t speak or hear anything without air. The air moving across our vocal cords creates sound vibrations that become speech, song, or cry of joy or distress. And sound only exists when there is a medium to carry the sound vibrations, air. So all music, and speech is a gift of air. So too is scent, smell a gift of air.

The element of air has entered our vocabulary with its own specific connotations, “air-head”, “airy fairy”, full of hot air, a blowhard, head in the clouds, “blowin in the wind….”, the universal comedy of wind in the form of flatus:~>;)

For millennia, air or wind has been seen as the movement of spirit. The Hebrew word for wind and spirit was “Ruach”, in Greek, wind was translated as “Pneuma” (think pneumonia), and in Latin, Spiritus. In each of these languages and traditions, these words for wind were also used for spiritual issues. When we “inspire” or inhale, we take the actual life-giving spirit of the divine into ourselves, and like the O2, it spreads throughout our body into the tiniest capillaries, permeating our body and soul. We may feel inspired with a great idea, calling, or inspired by God to some service or choice. In Genesis, in the Old Testament, God fashioned man out of the dirt of the ground and breathed life into him. Without breath, we are lifeless matter, clay or dust. In the Eastern traditions, Hindu Yoga focuses on breath to gain unity of mind-body-spirit. Likewise, Kundalini Yoga employs the breath as an avenue to kundalini awakening. Similarly, Zen Buddhism’s primary meditative focus is on the breath. In Chinese, it is called chi, the life force, energy of spirit.

For me, the practice of mindfulness is primarily the practice of observing my breath. Doing so, is the most practical and immediate way of moving my awareness into the present moment, the present breath, this breath, now. When the spirit wind blows, it is utterly unpredictable and uncontrollable.

In John 3:5-8 Jesus answered (Nicodemus’ question), “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and of the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, you must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit”. I quote this verse not to affirm any modern day exclusivist use of the term “born again”, but to acknowledge that through multiple faiths throughout the world and history, spirit wind is used to describe the animation of the spiritual life beyond the physical life, which comes through waters of the birth canal, physical birth.

During this sabbatical year, I am seeking inspiration and waiting, asking, listening for it every day. I sense the presence of spirit very frequently and am energized and uplifted, encouraged and strengthened. In the New Testament the spirit is called by many names, guide, teacher, comforter, healer, wisdom, the essence, the spark of the divine that animates my body and empowers my soul. The spirit is the still small voice within, to which I try to listen, beneath my noisy, restless egoic “monkey mind” and the cacophony of the world and it’s distractions, it’s “10,000 things” that delude and distract me from the One. The paradox is that the “One and the Many” are both true, depending upon the level of reality, the domain that I am looking at. I believe that I am incarnated, here on earth as a fleshly animal to learn to be fully human, as Jesus modeled, fully alive and animated in my body, fulfilling the specific calling of my soul, the acorn becoming an oak tree. At the same time, I am called to live in such a way as to awaken and increase the holy spirit in my self and in others.

Wild Geese (wild geese are a Celtic metaphor for the spirit) Mary Oliver

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine,
Meanwhile the world goes on
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of rain
are moving across the landscapes,
The mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
Over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver