Last week I wrote a DM about the bombing of oil depots in Iran that left me aghast. Cats on the streets of Tehran were coughing along with every human gasping for healthy air. How dare we take air for granted!
Several years ago I read the book, Caesar’s Last Breath by Sam Kean. Ever since, I have been living with awareness of the wonders and marvels of the wonders and marvels of the air we breathe.
Kean knows his science and is also an excellent storyteller. Written in 2017, his book stays with me still. Scientific research since, including information from the Webb Telescope, no doubt can add to the story.
Sextillions of molecules enter or leave our lungs each moment and some include the last breath Caesar breathed—or Jesus or Buddha for that matter. The air we breathe bears traces of Cleopatra’s perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of star dust from the universe’s creation.
Air matters. The alchemy of air reshaped our continents, steered human progress, powered revolutions, and continues to influence everything we do.
There is nothing simple about the air we breathe—Our atmosphere is one of the most complicated physical systems in existence. Only recently have scientists started to appreciate just how complex our atmosphere is, rivaling the human brain in both its intricacy and its fragility.
Earth made our air. We don’t usually think about air as being created—it seems like it just is—but all planets have to manufacture their atmospheres from scratch. And despite how nasty volcanic fumes might seem, they supplied the basic ingredients on earth. Understanding our air, then, requires understanding these explosions of lava and gas…” Kean alludes to the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980. (I led a retreat on Mount Saint Helens a year before it erupted. It was then I heard for the first time the song, “We Are Dancing Sara’s Circle” from a woman co-leading the retreat with me.)
Everything—even mountains, and the floor beneath us—started as a gas—you are an ex-gas.
Today oxygen comprises about 21% of our air. Approximately half comes from plants and half from microbes. The other dominant gas is nitrogen which accumulated steadily over billions of years—but oxygen is different. It “spurted” beginning around 2.3 billion years ago. About 600 million years ago, the first complex plants and animals appeared in the fossil record. In the hundreds of millions of years since, oxygen levels have veered drunkenly, dipping as low as 15 % and rising as high as 35 %.
When oxygen was at 35%, insects were big as giants—millipedes were a yard long, dragonflies as big as seagulls, spiders the size of tires. They were the colossal of insects, all thanks to oxygen. Most insects today are tiny—they’d suffocate otherwise.
I am not a scientist, so I depend on learning from scientists about creation and the world we live in. But being a student and teacher of spirituality, I am alert to spiritual language such as “thanks” when scientists utter it.
Says Kean: Thankfully, plants and cyanobacteria replenish our oxygen budget every day, and what results is Yin and yang, thesis and antithesis, perfect equilibrium. Equilibrium surely is another word for justice or balance.
Kean celebrates the symmetry and beauty of oxygen and CO2 as “inspiring.” Why? Because it took so long to evolve and because there are so many more moving parts, so many more ways it could all go wrong. Yet it doesn’t. Oak trees, birds of paradise, cyanobacteria, we’re all in this together.*
* Sam Kean, Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us, pp. 257f., 230, 22f., 102-104.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.
Banner Image: Seeing the air on a cold day — a bird sings in a meadow. Photo by Steve Smith on Unsplash.
Queries for Contemplation
Are you inspired by these stories about the air we breathe and earth and universe we live in? Are these original blessings enough to render humanity grateful enough to choose love and peace over war and competition? Are we truly all in this together?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
“Sexuality and Compassion: From Climbing Jacob’s Ladder to Dancing Sara’s Circle.” in Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion, pp. 36-67.
Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on creation, darkness, and the soul in spirituality and science.
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings in Creation Spirituality.
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance.
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation.
Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality.
Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest, pp. 121, 130, 319.
3 thoughts on “Our Sacred Air: An Original Blessing We Dare Not Take For Granted”
Yes, awareness of the air I breathe allows me to see the universe as a womb in which something temporarily called “I” is the process of being born, fed by an invisible yet very tangible umbilical cord made of air. Breath awareness also acts as spiritual oxygen. It started for me when some of Isaac Asimov’s popular science books made me aware of the astronomical number of molecules we inhale and exhale about fifteen times per minute and it culminated later in life when I was fortunate to experience holotropic breathwork. Awareness of the fact that each breath contains molecules once breathed (or otherwise released…) by Jesus, Judas, Cesar, Brutus, Buddha, Hitler, as well as by the dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures also provides each of us with an atmospheric family tree going back to the dawn of time. It is no accident that the word “spirit” comes from a Latin root meaning “breath” and that the loss of spiritual air often leads to substitute liquid spirits. Carl Jung characterized that deadly barter by coining the expression “spiritus contra spiritum.”
YES! YES! YES! Truly we must be grateful for the mystery and Grace of DIVINE LOVE/LIFE/CREATION SPIRIT PRESENT within each breath we take that reminds us of the Sacredness of the Creative Newness of every ongoing ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT of OUR LOVING EVOLVING DIVERSE ONENESS….
Thank you for the fascinating information on air. It is truly a miracle, but my heart breaks as I remember what LA looked like back in the 50’s–dense, thick smog. Young people don’t even know what smog is, but I fear its return in the near future with the administration’s attack on the EPA. We may end up strangling ourselves. In the meantime, though, we can look for the true and the good and the beautiful because they are always in sight if we care to look.