Gusting the tops of small waves, a wind carrying salt spray collides with another thick with tree pollen; edges of both merge with a breeze plucking lichen spores from the surface of rocks as it rides up the hill where I sit, high above the coast, gazing at a far-off tanker filled with tar sands crude. Behind me, another breeze lingers at the forest edge, spiced by truck exhaust and the reek from two oyster shells broken open by a raven. I breathe in, and all those unseen currents converge, pollen and petrol fumes flooding up through my nostrils (tweaking dendrites and spreading twangs of sensation along my scalp) and then down into my chest, charging my blood and feeding the vigor in my limbs. I stretch, shoulder muscles cracking, and exhale. The feelings sparked by the sight of that tanker lend their tremor to the breath pouring out through my lips: wonder and worry texture the small vortices in front of me and the eddying flows that rush past me, informing the interference patterns between my exhalations and those of the tall cedars and the mist rising from the Salish Sea.

What is climate change if not a consequence of failing to respect or even to notice the elemental medium in which we’re immersed? Is not global warming, or global weirding, a simple consequence of taking the air for granted?
It is easy, you might say, to overlook something that’s invisible. We don’t commonly notice our breathing, although it enables all that we do notice. And we don’t commonly see the air, since it’s that through which we see everything else. The atmosphere is ungraspable, unmappable, and hopelessly unpredictable—an ever-shifting flux we’re generally unable to lay eyes on. The unseen quality of the air is what prompted so many traditional peoples to pay surpassing respect to this medium, acknowledging the breath and the gusting wind as aspects of an especially sacred power, a ubiquitous and meaning-filled plenum in which they found themselves immersed.
Yet in the modern era, it’s that same invisibility that leads us to take the air for granted; since we can’t see it, perhaps there’s nothing of consequence there. We have ceased speaking to the unseen spirits that gathered near rivers or lingered near certain herbs. We have stopped feeling for the invisible qualities that reside in particular places. We have quit tasting the breeze, stopped noticing the steady gift of our breath, and generally forgotten the air. Today, we rarely acknowledge the atmosphere as it swirls between two persons. We don’t speak of the air between our body and a nearby tree, but rather the empty space between us. It’s empty. Just an absence of stuff, without feeling or meaning. A void.
And hence, a perfect place to throw whatever we hope to a-void. The perfect dump site for the unwanted byproducts of our industries, 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-fueled vehicles—spewing from automobiles and airplanes, cruise ships and tug boats and giant tankers lugging thick tar sands oil 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.

Mind—or consciousness, or awareness1—is a hopelessly amorphous and ephemeral phenomenon, one that’s mighty tough to pin down. 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 dramatically at odds with one another, for 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 thought. 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 may be that a fresh conception, or image, of mind is in order. An image that has a sort of wisdom built right into it. Curiously, our experience of awareness—this amorphous and ephemeral power—has much in common with our felt experience of earth’s atmosphere.
Consider the air, the light-filled and fluid element in which you’re now immersed, with its agitations and its calms, its storms and its subsidences. Consider the unseen currents drifting between the soils and the scudding clouds and circulating among us wherever we find ourselves, pouring in through the door and eddying along the walls, streaming in at 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, for wherever we step it is already there.
Mind, in this sense, is very much like a medium in which we’re corporeally situated, and from which we’re simply unable to extricate ourselves without ceasing to exist. Everything we know or 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 quality 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 within it—a recognition that we are carnally immersed in an awareness that is not, properly speaking, ours, but is rather the earth’s.2

Among the Inuit and Yupik peoples inhabiting the circumpolar arctic, the enigma is named Sila. There are variants in local dialects: Hila, Hla, Shla, Sla, Tla. 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 it, of storm and mist and every other kind of weather, but also: awareness, consciousness.
Silarjuaq: 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.3 The great indweller in the air, Sila is the source of all breath, of all life, of all awareness. Awairness. Wind-mind.
In the early 1920s, an old Inuit angakoq (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
[. . .] 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 men 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 are 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.4
Rasmussen’s written records and many more recent ethnographies make evident the importance, for the Inuit, 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 in the air, subsumes all individual inua, or breath-souls, within itself.
Sila is the life-giving element, which enfolds all the world and invests all living organisms [. . .] Sila is the word for air, without air there is no life; air is in all people and all creatures [. . .] Every individual is said to have as part of his 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 man. 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.5
This old, circumpolar understanding neatly unties the modern philosophical knot 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 body. 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, yet each of us engages it with the particularities of our own flesh. And since your body is different from mine in many ways, so your experience of 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 lupines, 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, yet 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.

Such an elegant conception, if taken seriously, opens a range of previously unsuspected insights into the contemporary climate predicament. Yet this perspective, at once strangely 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 have just this week returned to my home in the southwest desert, reacquainting myself with the sunset hues of sandstone and the scents of juniper and sage. Here in this land 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.
Among the Dineh (or Navajo) people, the encompassing and fluid power that grants all beings life, movement, and awareness is called Nilch’i, the Holy Wind. Nilch’i is the whole body of the air, or atmosphere, including those parts of the air in motion and those at rest; it is the medium through which all beings (mountains, coyotes, cottonwood trees, owls) communicate with one another. The sacred nature of the Holy Wind resides not merely in our thorough dependence upon it, but in its subtlety and invisibility: we witness it only by means of the visible things that it animates. There exist innumerable local winds, breezes, storms, gusts, and whiffs that stir within the broad body of the Holy Wind, including the winds that dwell and circulate within each of us. The individual “wind within one” was long misunderstood by anthropologists, who assumed that it referred to an autonomous spirit, or soul, akin to the personal soul of Christian belief. These interpreters failed to recognize that, for the Navajo, the “wind within one” was continuous with the enveloping wind at large—that the wind circulating within each person was informed by the wider wind that sweeps the desert grasses. Similarly, the two little winds, called “wind’s children,” that linger in the spiraling folds of a person’s ears, often whispering worded insights to her as she goes about her days: these, as well, are just a part of the expansive body of Holy Wind. For the Navajo, in other words, the very thoughts that we hear churning within our heads are spoken by small whirlwinds, or eddies, within the vast transparence of nilch’i, the fluid wind-mind of the world.6
Within this rich cosmology, the different qualities of the various gusts, gales, whirlwinds, crosscurrents, blasts, and breezes that roll across the desert are recognized in the diverse names by which they are invoked: Dawn Man, Sky Blue Woman, Twilight Man, Dark Wind, Wind’s Child, Revolving Wind, Glossy Wind, Rolling Darkness Wind, and many others. The Navajo distinguish unpredictable winds and steady winds, harmful winds and helpful winds. Each person must navigate among these invisible influences with great care, striving to bring her life into hozho—dynamic balance—with these immersive powers.
Nor are humans purely passive with respect to the Holy Wind. Like the mountains in the four directions, like the plants and the other animals, human persons are one of the Wind’s dwelling places, one of its many centers; just as we are nourished and influenced by the air at large, so our thoughts and our actions affect the air in turn. Human intentions can most effectively alter the world around us through the power of spoken utterance, through oral prayer and chanted song, which resonate and transform the very texture of the surrounding winds. Hence, among the Navajo, abundant energy and artistry are given to ceremonies like the Blessingway, wherein persons invoke and project hozho into the enveloping atmosphere through a ritual cycle of songs. At the conclusion of any such ceremony, the participants breathe the renewed hozho back into their lungs, making themselves a part of the harmony, order, and beauty that they have just established in the ambient medium through the power of the chant.7 The relation between the Navajo people and the animate cosmos that enfolds and includes them is participatory and reciprocal; they are not just passive recipients of Wind’s influence, but instead are both passive and active, inhaling and exhaling, receiving the nourishment of the myriad beings and actively nourishing them in turn.
Meanwhile, among the many pueblo cultures (including the Hopi, the Zuni, and the various pueblos villages of northern New Mexico) another emphasis predominates: the preciousness of life-giving rain within this high desert realm. Whenever a person from the pueblo dies, her vapor-essence is felt to journey across the land to the dwelling place of the kachinas—the spirit ancestors. The kachinas are regularly “fed” by the respectful actions of those who are alive, and by the seasonal ceremonies, the resplendent dances and prayer offerings undertaken throughout the yearly cycle by the villagers. The spirit ancestors, feeling thus honored, return to their respective pueblos whenever they choose: they gather and thicken within the sky’s transparence, materializing as clouds carrying and bodying-forth the rain essential for the corn and the other crops upon which the people depend. In the pueblo cosmologies, death brings into existence the ancestors, who return as rain-bearing clouds fertilizing the soil with water. The moisture feeds the corn that, in turn, nourishes the living. Human life and human death are here an integral part of the hydrological cycle. As the people depend on the climate so, reciprocally, the climate depends on the people for its continued flourishing.
I shudder to speak of matters held so sacred to these oral traditions, and even more so to write of these understandings, which were never meant to be written down. Much as I tremble to speak aloud the most sacred name of the Holy in my own tribal, Jewish tradition, the four-letter name that—rightly spoken—is not other than the inhale and the exhale, the living breath of awareness. And so I ask the blessing of my ancestors, feeling them in the unseen ruah. (Hebrew for the divine wind, or “rushing spirit”) that surrounds me, here, as I write. I bow to the various peoples indigenous to this region where I dwell, as well as to the animals, plants, and spirits of this parched terrain, asking their permission that I may write, here, of these things. Because these storied knowings, of which I comprehend so little, nonetheless need to be heard once again, and what is common among them needs to be felt, acknowledged, and replenished if life is to flourish.

Oral cultures are cultures of story. Spoken and chanted stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge. Preserved among the many layers of these tales (tucked within the complex adventures of their characters) were precise instructions for the gathering of specific plants and how to prepare them as foods and as medicines, for tracking bear or hunting caribou, and for enacting the proper rituals of gratitude when a hunt was successful. The stories carried instructions about how to fend for one’s family when a prolonged drought dried up the local streams, or—more generally—how to live well in a specific land without destroying the land’s wild vitality.
Such practical intelligence, intimately related to a particular place, is the hallmark of any deeply oral culture. Continually tested in interaction with the living land, altering in tandem with subtle changes in the local earth, even today such living knowledge resists the fixity and permanence of the printed page. Nor does it come across when printed or displayed on the electronic screen, whose disembodying sheen and glide ensure that the place-based secrets hidden within each tale will be lost in the digital tide, as the story loses its analog grip on a particular soil. Since it is specific to the way things happen here, in this high desert—or coastal estuary, or mountain valley—this kind of intimate intelligence loses much of its meaning when abstracted from its terrain, and from the particular animals, plants, and practices that are a part of its life. Such intelligence, properly speaking, is an attribute of the living land itself; it thrives only in the direct, face-to-face interchange between those who dwell and work in that place.
The primacy of breath in oral traditions—the identification of awareness with the unseen air, and the consequent sacredness accorded to the invisible medium in which we and the other creatures are bodily immersed—has been for most human cultures a simple and obvious intuition, although interpreted, storied, and ritualized in divergent ways by different peoples in different bioregions. The intuition is empowered by the centrality of the spoken (rather than written) word in indigenous lifeways; for traditionally oral cultures, verbal language is not, primarily, a visible set of static marks, but rather an utterance carried on the exhaled breath. Words, here, are nothing other than shaped breath. Hence the fluid air is the implicit intermediary in all communication, the very medium of meaning.8

“The media” is the phrase we use, today, to name our various forms of widespread communication. Yet all of our many media—whether written, electronic, or digital—derive from the original medium of communication: the unseen air that once transmitted all our songs and spoken stories as it carried the whistling of blackbirds and the gurgled utterances of frogs, bearing lichen spores and bee swarms and the exhalations of humpback whales.
Radio personnel still use the phrase “we are on air” or “we are off air” to indicate when they’re broadcasting. Yet while contemporary media tacitly depend on the fluid atmosphere, the new media all contribute to the overlooking, or forgetting, of the original medium. In this regard, our newly invented media mimic a tendency endemic to the alphabet, the invention that made them all possible.
The earliest versions of the alphabet, which arose in the ancient near east in the second millennium BC, took care not to violate the primacy of the unseen medium that surrounds and animates all visible things. Like other early Semitic alphabets, the early Hebrew (or paleo-Hebrew) aleph bait avoided inscribing the vowels upon the parchment or papyrus; in these most ancient forms of the alphabet, only the consonants were written down. The consonants, of course, are the shapes by which we sculpt our sounded breath, forming words with the tongue, lips, and teeth as we exhale. The vowels, meanwhile, are the sounds made by the breath itself as it vibrates our vocal cords and flows out through the mouth. To the ancient Hebrews, the vowels—as sounded breath—were inseparable from the ruah. , the divine wind, a mystery whose invisibility they dared not violate. For the ruah. was the unseen but immanent presence of GD (the divine breath that the Holy One first blew into the nostrils of Adam, bringing the first human form to life). And so the Semitic scribes wrote only the consonants, the structure or skeleton of the words. Even today, the reader of a traditional Hebrew text must herself choose which vowels to pronounce between the written consonants, lending her own breath to those bones on the page in order to make them come alive and begin to speak.9
Phoenician traders carried the early aleph bait across the Mediterranean. When the ancient Greeks encountered and adapted this Semitic invention for their own tongue, they inserted written letters to represent the vowel sounds. For the first time, the breath sounds were rendered visible and explicit on the written page. By this simple move, making a visible representation of the invisible breath, the Greek scribes effectively desacralized the unseen medium. They breached the older (Hebraic) taboo on imaging the invisible, effectively de-sanctifying the breath and the wind, making it possible for alphabetic readers to begin to overlook, or forget, the pervasive power of the air. Indeed, the sensuous interplay between the visible and invisible aspects of surrounding nature was soon replaced, in ancient Athens, by a new dichotomy between sensuous nature as a whole and another, wholly nonsensible world hidden entirely beyond the physical. The Greek philosopher Plato, developing his new conception of an immaterial heaven of pure ideas—a dimension not just invisible, but thoroughly intangible, and hence beyond all bodily ken—was, with this conception, sanctioning a new forgetfulness of the immanent mystery of the air itself, a forgetting first made possible by the very script in which he wrote his many dialogues.10
With the gradual spread of the new, vowelized alphabet, and—later—with the broad dissemination of alphabetic texts made possible by the printing press, the primacy of spoken phrases that sculpt and ride the fluid air was slowly displaced by our spreading fascination with the written word. Meaning drained out of the air and became fixed on the page. Fewer and fewer people sensed their ancestors in the winds, or in the quiet stirring of leaves in a forest, since now the ancestors seemed to speak much more clearly from the bound leaves of books. The surrounding air, divested of awareness or psyche, lost its felt reality; it came to be felt mostly as a kind of absence, merely the hurrying of molecules, endlessly, meaninglessly.11 And soon was hardly felt, or noticed, at all.

Like the air, the “new media” are ubiquitous, pervasive, and ever present. With the advent of the Internet and the emergence of wireless computing, the new media permeate our workspaces and our homes, suffusing the space of our cities and towns. As cellular, GPS, and now smart phones proliferate, digital media inform the electromagnetic spectrum throughout more and more of the countryside, infiltrating woodlands and swamps, glancing off mountain ridges, washing through even the wild backcountry. They saturate our lives. We may power off the iPhone or shut the lid on our laptop, but the information’s still churning all around and even through us, ready to display itself as soon as we open whatever new handheld gadget, whatever screen-fitted thingamajig currently accompanies us.
Omnipresent as air, seemingly omniscient as well, the new media perfectly deflect the atmosphere from our attention. Unlike the bothersome subjection of our animal flesh to whatever weather’s brewing, we feel we have control over these media, able to conjure whatever data we wish onto the screen (in whatever interface we have chosen). Humans alone are online here; no other species clutter the frequencies or muddle the field with their pheromones. There’s no ambiguity, nor the bother of having to expose our pimples, or render ourselves vulnerable by meeting others in the palpable world of flesh and blood. The tangible earth’s getting way too weird anyway, with its fires and famines and floods, its flaring riots and refugees: better to hang out online, adrift in the cloud.
The new media grab our focus and hold our fascination, and they keep our kids occupied, too, granting us a ready vacation from the perplexity of the real, or helping us avoid it altogether.
Sooner or later, though, the media trance leaves us gasping for air. Because the ubiquitous data’s all so instantaneous, so much of it instantly accessible, answers to any question right here at our fingertips and right now in our face, though we have not had a moment to digest or even chew the last meal or morsel. There is too much of it, a superfluity of information, a glut, a flood. Info on pretty much anything and everything we can think of, and mostly what we cannot, but now here it is anyway: a paragraph that’s mildly relevant to the problem that my kids and I are puzzling out this afternoon, yet halfway down that paragraph a highlighted word links to another nugget of interesting knowledge attached to a video clip; the first few seconds of the segment abruptly call to mind another video I had wanted to glance at last week but forgot, regarding the luscious mating ritual of hermaphroditic leopard slugs, so I try to find it now on Youtube or Vimeo but get snagged by someone’s TED talk about a new app for mapping gender inequality across countries and cultures. All these images, all this text, all this digital data churning past thick as flies, dense as fog, viscous as syrup laced with corn starch and captions, mucilaginous, and we are in the thick of it, mouths wide open, glugging.
Hence the need for air. For a bit of breathing space. For a chance to breathe.
A filter would be useful, some way of standing and taking our bearings in the midst of this tide that keeps rising. A way of remembering what is primary, and catching our breath, letting our digital encounters dissolve back into the spacious quietude, an open silence broken only now and then by the sigh of the wind through the tall grasses. There is a need for depth, for possibilities that beckon from afar, for enigmas that reside in the distance. Or rather for some things that are close by and accessible while others wait in the far-off hills, and still others roam the middle space between these, foraging among the stones at the edge of the creek. There is a need for distances that we feel and sometimes commit ourselves to crossing—giving our muscles to the slow, patient craft of making our way through the palpable depths of the sensuous.
The oncoming storms of climate change, the never-before-seen winds tossing down power lines and ripping out trees by their roots, the thudding torrents of rain in some regions and the unbroken heat cracking the soil in others, all are a consequence of our long forgetfulness. Of our forgetting the invisible, taking for granted what we could not see. We overlooked that element held most holy by our oral ancestors, the unseen flux long assumed to be the very source of all awareness, wind-mind of the world: the Commonwealth of Breath.
The swelling storms are a simple consequence of treating the atmosphere as an open sewer, a magic dump site for whatever we wished to avoid. Out of sight, out of mind . . . or so we thought.
But for our oral elders and ancestors, that which dissipates as smoke or dissolves into the unseen air is by that very process slipping into the mind, binding itself back into the encompassing awareness from which our bodies steadily drink, the wild sentience of the world, moody with weather . . .
We renew our participation in the more-than-human community—in the breathing commons—by telling stories. Not, however, stories that we print in books or post on glowing screens, or send out as podcasts. Stories, rather, that we tell aloud, face to face, sharing the same air with those who listen and offer a tale in return. Not just tales that have been written, or recorded, and hence abstracted from the whisper and sing-song and push-pull of the local earth where they once drew their relevance. Stories, rather, that hold sway in particular places, carrying in their textures and rhythms something of the relation between humans and the other animals, herbs, waters, woodlands, and weather patterns that compose the cycling life of the land where we dwell.
Scholars, philosophers, and authors attentive to what has been called “the new materialism,” and the other emerging discourses in which the vibrancy and eloquence of material things are re-asserting themselves, have much necessary work to do, disclosing the manifold ways that ostensibly human narratives arise from our ongoing corporeal interchange with various other bodies and fluid trajectories—with other material agencies that express themselves to, and often through, our own bodily materiality, speaking through our actions, our technologies, our creative endeavors. But material ecocritics should consider resisting the instinctive academic impulse to write down and record every single one of their findings; they should consider withholding a few of their crucial discoveries from the page and the glowing screen, in order to let those insights dwell in their particular places, in order to shape them on the breath between their body and breathing terrain. Writing is an astonishing magic, but one that’s best used judiciously, since it tends to shut out other beings that do not speak in words. As long as we humans communicate mostly via these more mediated modes of interchange, as long as face-to-face oral culture remains dormant, then the human collective will likely stay somewhat impervious to the full presence of these palpable others.
Writing matters down easily interrupts our felt rapport with other earthly beings, since it involves transcribing our ongoing exchange with the many-voiced cosmos into an almost exclusively human register. We translate our dialogues with wind and pelting rain, with petrochemicals, genetically altered insects, and melting glaciers into a discursive space that nonetheless remains largely closed to other species, impenetrable to other shapes of sentience. We maintain the pretense that humans alone can make sense of what’s happening; even as we critique it, we re-inscribe our aloofness from the animate, expressive earth.
Of course, our body remains participant in countless conversations that cannot be translated into words. Such corporeal exchanges can, however, find their way into tales and tellings that involve our whole speaking and gesturing organism; when we engage in such oral storytelling, the other beings in the sensorial vicinity—whether humans or flapping crows, whether the termite-riddled trunk of an old oak or the collapsed ruin of an old factory—can readily register (and perhaps even feel) something of what’s being said, since our speaking has its own material rhythm and pulse, since our creaturely body’s caught up in the awkward dance of the thing we’re saying. And so other expressive bodies—coyotes howling, a squeaking bicycle, streamwater gushing through culverts or rolling over the guttural stones—can enter into and alter the story in the present moment of its telling.

By listening for such tales, and beginning to tell them aloud out in the terrain, in the very place where those events might have happened (whether in a backcountry stand of tall pines or among the toxic slurry ponds left by an abandoned mine), we begin to rejuvenate oral culture. By sharing such tales as we replant a clearcut forest, by spinning a fresh song out of the struggle to block a tar sands pipeline, or to halt the spread of hydraulic fracking, we bring our sounding bodies back into resonance with the other beings that surround. And as we weave such stories, aloud, into the craft of gathering herbs or raising kids in that land, we begin to bind human language back into a much wider conversation. By turning off our screens, now and then, to come together in the flesh, by camping beneath the buzzing streetlights on a city square exposed to the weather, by gathering along a river to honor the cyclical return of the salmon, or telling a tale of the migrating cranes as they flap their way north above our upturned faces, we bring our spinning minds back into alignment with the broad intelligence of the biosphere.
The feathered wings of those cranes paddle through the invisible, as their echoing cries stutter down through the vast silence. Our animal senses awaken; we remember the primacy of the sensuous cosmos that reigns underneath all our abstractions. The breathing earth articulates itself not in statistics but in seedpods and storms and spoken stories. Listening, shaping a phrase on the wind, falling silent . . . in this way we reacquaint ourselves with our real community, and orient ourselves to meet the clouds massing in the distance. The land’s awareness slides easily in and out of our nostrils. We reclaim our membership in the commonwealth of breath.

Notes

1. I use these terms, here, in their broadest or most inclusive sense, including within their meaning not just focused awareness (or full waking consciousness), but simple sensibility or sentience.
2. Of course from the perspective of salmon, sea lions, and kelp fronds, or the divergent angle of humpbacks trading their eerie glissando-cries across the fathoms, it is not air but rather the fluid medium of water that carries the glimmering quality of awareness, altering its modes and moods with the tides, hiding uncountable feeling tones within its depths—sensations that sometimes blossom out of the thickness to surround and seep into and become one’s being for a time. Yet how uncannily different, how oddly other is water from air when one inhabits it as one’s element and medium!
3. Jaypeetee Arnakak, in Timothy Leduc, Climate Culture Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), 26–31.
4. Daniel Merkur, Powers Which We Do Not Know: The Gods and Spirits of the Inuit (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1991), 46. See also Leduc, Climate Culture Change, 21–22. The English translation of Rasmussen’s notes, written in Danish, varies slightly across these and other texts.
5. Robert G. Williamson, Eskimo Underground: Socio-Cultural Change in the Central Canadian Arctic (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1974), 22–23.
6. James Kale McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981). This book is the fruit of twenty years of close association with the Navajo. McNeley is married to a Dineh woman; both of them taught for many years at Shiprock on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. See also David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 230–237.
7. Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 61.
8. If you doubt the ubiquity of this notion, ponder for a moment the etymology of the common English words “spirit” (from Latin spiritus: a breath, or a gust of wind), or “psyche” (from the ancient Greek verb psychein: to breathe or to blow, as a wind). Consider the Latin word for the soul, anima (from the older Greek anemos, meaning wind) from whence derive such terms as “animal” (an ensouled being) and “unanimous” (being of one mind). Or consider the term “atmosphere,” itself cognate with the Sanskrit word ātman, which signifies the soul or self (whether of the cosmos, or of a person).
9. Traditional Hebraic spirituality was both literate and oral at the same time. The Hebrew scribes and priests were literate in their relation to the visible cosmos, insisting that GD could not be found in the visible things of the world. But by avoiding writing down the vowels, they preserved an intensely oral, animistic relation to the invisible air, wind and breath—to the unseen medium that moves between and binds all visible things.
10. For abundant and carefully documented evidence for this claim, see the chapters “Animism and the Alphabet” and “The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air,” in Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 93–135 and 225–260.
11. A paraphrase of Alfred North Whitehead, who described the scientific conception of nature at the end of the seventeenth century as “merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 69.