Imagine yourself under water, still fully able to breathe.
Now try moving.
Move just one arm and hand, slowly at first. Can you “feel” how the “water” streams around the arm, between the fingers, across the back of the hand and all around? As I do it now, I feel a fluidity in the movement itself, as if my arm and hand suddenly have a new life to them. They seem drawn to go on their own wherever they can, to flow and undulate anywhere and everywhere, to experiment spontaneously with greater freedom of motion. These slow, inherently elegant movements seem to become more fluid merely by imagining and thereby sensing that they are in a fluid.
If you are doing it now, can you feel how graceful your moving has already become? And how effortless? Linger in this feeling as long as you like while continuing to move. And if you like, gradually let the rest of your body join in. Let yourself become a strand of kelp waving rhythmically in a bed of waving kelp in the ocean near where sea meets land. You might try standing up if you are sitting, and let your whole body, arms, legs, torso, and head, move however it likes, feeling the flowing currents around the body as it is drawn into responding in whatever ways it chooses to the fluid within which it is immersed.
Actually, we do live at the bottom of an ocean—an ocean of air. Letting go of the water image, you might play with seeing if you can actually feel this ocean of air with your skin as you move your arms and hands as slowly as before, feeling the streaming of the air through and around your fingers and hands, bathing in the sensations you are experiencing, whatever they are. As you settle more and more into your body and bring more and more awareness to the body as a whole, allowing it to move on its own, in its own way, perhaps noticing how the felt sense of the body moving can turn amazingly, instantly, into the essence of tai chi—flowing movement within stillness, within an ocean of awareness, an ocean of air.
Now allow yourself to come to stillness and sense the air with your whole body. Rather than searching for a particular feeling, let it emerge on its own, as if you were listening with your skin for the air to speak. You do not have to reach out or try to do or feel anything. After all, the air is already all around you and inside you, touching you.
Without trying, sensing how you are already embedded in this fluid, how the ocean of air caresses your skin, envelops you, embraces you, even when it is hardly moving in a room, even when it is utterly still. Feel how you are mysteriously drawn to draw it into your body over and over again through your nose or mouth, how this happens without your trying, without any forcing, without volition even. Feel how it is received by the baskets that are your lungs, and reflect for a moment on how the oxygen molecules, unimaginably tiny, are magically snared out of the air that has diffused from the alveoli in your lungs into the bloodstream by the correspondingly enormous but still unimaginably tiny hemoglobin molecules packed into now—in the binding with oxygen—bright red blood cells that do only the job of transporting that air essence with every contraction of the left ventricle of your heart to all the trillions of cells that make up the infinitely complex universe of your body, all of which would soon die without this essential sustenance. Such a reflection might give occasion to pause for a moment, allowing you to metaphorically catch your breath and consciously situate yourself in the airscape.
Myself, I am currently having an on-again, off-again love affair with the air. When I remember, the love affair is on. When I forget, it is off again until the air itself re-minds me, and re-bodies me.
Not that it is hard to love the air. In summer, light morning breezes flow over bare shoulders as I sit in stillness, breathing with eyes closed, or open. I feel the air around the body with my skin and lo, the skin is enlivened. I bathe in the sometime gusts and subtler currents in the room, drink in the humidity and the freshness, and I am of a sudden more awake. The dankness of a sometimes heavy evening speaks in its own tongue to skin and nose, every bit as much as do the excitations of a sea breeze square in my face, the balm of a midwinter thaw, and the bite of a January wind that freezes skin anywhere it is exposed.
It wasn’t always so. For most of my life, the air was just the air, not really noticed at all and appreciated even less. Slowly the realization has crept up on me that it is indeed just air, but what a gift. What a sensuous gift, this invitation to feel what is already offered to us, to experience that we are being perpetually embraced and nourished, at all times both touched by and touching the spirit of Ariel, the very air itself. We are breathing and being breathed. We are living in air, like Chagall figures, and living on it and off it too.
When I relate to the air with a degree of affection, intimacy, and constancy, that is, with increasing mindfulness, it is hard not to notice that the airscape is continually in flux. One moment it is moving, the next moment it is still. It beckons me, awakens me, keeps me on my toes when I feel it in this way. Now it is warm. I look and feel again, and it is cool. Its various personas are met in different hours, in its different seasons. The sweet back-to-school coolness, full of memories, the bracing chill of winter, more memories, and the occasional warm day with a feeling all its own for not being summer but pretending, while snow and ice are all around, melting, and giving the air its own unique signature of feels and smells.
The air, the air, the air. Once you begin paying attention to it, loving the air, you can easily understand why it was elevated and revered as a primordial element by ancient civilizations. The air! The air! As I look out at the stand of hemlocks, they are swaying, playing at their tai chi. I feel the same air that is moving them moving now across my back and shoulders and neck. In this, we are united, touched by the very same wave, each moved and moving in our own ways, and also, amazingly, joined in an exchange that is larger than us both, in which all life, plant and animal, is participating in every moment around the entire planet, a giving and receiving between these large living kingdoms on a cosmic scale, a recycling and revitalizing of the air that also recycles and revitalizes us.
And this dynamic exchange, wonder of wonders, maintains this thin and strangely vulnerable invisible blanket of atmosphere that wraps and hugs our round home within the unthinkable vastness of the vacuum we call space, a vacuum of almost emptiness, almost nothing.
And that, from our point of view as living creatures, is everything… because without the invisible air, we are soon nothing again ourselves.
Hast thou, which are but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions?
W. SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest