Poems by Timothy Hohn

Ode to Air

by Timothy Hohn

From Canary Spring 2019

Tim does most of his reading, writing, and reflection on a sunny aerie overlooking the entrance to East Sound on Orcas Island, Washington.

Standing on a dock, my son Sam and I are looking over the railing at fish lolling back and forth in a gentle current. We engage in a humorous muse over the prospect of the fish noticing us just as we are noticing them. We think: there they are, so calmly immersed in water, breathing the fluid without difficulty or concern. They may be looking at us and marveling over our exposure in the air, breathing it without apparent difficulty or concern. One of the perceptual differences that adds to our interest in the fish (and other aquatic life) breathing the water is that you can see it; it obviously has greater density, texture, and viscosity than the air. The notion of letting something so tangible in with a breath—something we’ve all done unintentionally with disturbing results—seems so alien! We laugh about the notion of the fish having similar thoughts about our apparently breathing and living in an invisible nothing. Of course, we both have need of the same life-giving element: oxygen.

We do take the air and the atmosphere for granted. However, I’m very aware of it in spring as a vector for tree pollen to my sensitive nose and eyes as well as the welcome carrier of rich organic spring smells of a warming and awakening land. It’s that relative invisibility that renders the atmosphere absent in our everyday thoughts and awareness, despite the fact that it has the most ubiquitous presence of the Earth’s vital elements— we’re surrounded and enveloped by it! My attention is abruptly focused on air when it is ripe with wonderful fragrances, carries aloft beautiful birds, ruffles my hair with a caressing breeze, or flexes its muscles with a stiff wind that activates the trees. I marvel over the substance of air and the force of the atmosphere when it lifts me off a runway in an unimaginably heavy airplane, each time thinking it might not go up, and then it does!

Air; such a quandary to our senses, at times undetectable and yet always fully present; we’re totally submerged in air! And that’s not all: it’s inside us nearly as much as it is outside, moving through our nose, our mouth, our ears, and our eyes. It seeps through all of our pores, and a good thing, too, for we’re completely dependent upon air. We need to draw it in through our nostrils and nasal cavities, over our tongues and tonsils, to funnel down our tracheas and oxygenate the capillaries in our lungs (I suspect you’re very aware of it at this moment!) You might say--considering the air we breathe, all the absorbed oxygen moving through our blood stream and permeating our cells, and whatever amount just happens to seep into us--that we are largely made up of air! Well-known scientist David Suzuki notes, "air embraces us so intimately that it is hard to say where we leave off and air begins.” Further, in his wonderful lecture, A Force of Nature, he makes the point, “…if you are air and I am air, then I am you, and you are me.”

Astronomer Harlow Shapley, in a profound thought experiment, noted that air is one percent argon. Shapley figured out that a single breath contains about 3 x 10 to the 19th power of argon atoms. That’s 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Argon is an inert gas and we breathe it in without absorbing it. That means the argon atoms you exhale are available for others to breathe in without change. Shapley calculated that in a year, those atoms will have circulated around the Earth and that you will likely breathe in 15 of them again! Because of the unchanging nature of argon, Shapley goes on to speculate that it’s possible that with any given breath you will be taking in argon that Gandhi breathed, or atoms that were expelled during the Last Supper, and others that were shared by dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, and whales! David Suzuki, building on the notion that the atmosphere connects us all, says that air is, “…a matrix that joins all life together,” past, present, and future. Indigenous cultures teach that we inhale our ancestors and exhale into our children. To them, air is a sacred element of the Earth.

Terrestrial organisms must take in air to live! But where is it? Its invisibility and general lack of perceived presence make it absent from our attention and overlooked as the most omnipresent characteristic of our environment. But, for us, it generally exists in obscurity, unattended by any human concerns even as it drifts in and out of our bodies and connects all living organisms. The oxygen the trees are passively breathing out, we have to breathe in along with all the other animals. And the carbon dioxide we are breathing out, the plants are breathing in to meet their needs. The air, in its essential invisibility, must be considered a vital element of the Earth; the intangible substance that brings life to the land and its precious constituent, oxygen, to the sea.

Our disinterest, inattention, taking for granted, daily forgetting, about air, might be construed as a subtle but significant loss of awareness—evidence of the separation of ourselves from the vital attributes and life-giving aspects of the natural environment. We’re often looking out, in a solipsistic way, at a completely external nature as a purely interior observer, more engaged with our human dramas and constructs than with vital aspects of the living Earth. Although we are continuously breathing it, we fail to notice that the air is there, our atmospheric substrate of life and seamless connection to the world.

Ahh, not to be cut off,
Not through the slightest partition
Shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
If not intensified sky,
Hurled through with birds and deep
With the winds of homecoming.

Rainer Maria Rilke