Abram’s chapter on air was quite fascinating. I loved his introductory paragraphs which so beautifully expresses our immersion in this matrix:

[quote omitted due to length]

The one day last week I was sitting in the library parking lot, looking at a young well formed tree of maple, probably eight or ten years old. It’s bare branches stood out against the brilliant blue sky. I began to see it as you do those black and white drawings where if you focus on the black you see one thing (two faces in profile) but if you focus on the white space you see another thing (a wineglass). I saw the tree and its roots in the ground as the black field and I saw the air as an equally tangible white field. I began to see (and here I was imagining summer) how the white field didn’t simply touch the black field, but actually penetrated it through the pores in the leaves. I began to see the tree as this entity that stitches together earth and sky—it’s equally rooted in both elements.

You know what amazes me, what will always amaze me? It’s these ridiculous foreshadowings that happen all the time, the odd synchronicities. One day to be contemplating the tangible quality of the air, only to find a few days later a whole chapter in a book about the very same thing, when I had never seen a single person address the topic before! It will always seem miraculous to me every time it happens.

In the same way as the air enters the pores of the tree it also enters the lungs of my body. Abram discusses the sacredness of the breath and the spoken word. He mentions how the Hebrew language has one word “ruach” that means both spirit and wind. In the earliest verses Genesis, God is present as a wind. God blows life into Adam, and God flows through us with each breath. When Abram was discussing YHWH and the mystery and questions surrounding its pronunciation, I immediately intuited (thanks to Abram because he was discussing it in the context of the sacredness of the breath) that YHWH is simply the in-breath and the out-breath. A few paragraphs later I came across this sentence: “Some contemporary students of Kabbalah suggest that the forgotten pronunciation of the name may have entailed forming the first syllable ‘Y-H’ on the whispered in-breath and the second syllable ‘W-H’ on the whispered out-breath--the whole name thus forming a single cycle of the breath.” I find it exquisite to think of God moving through me with every breath. We are immersed in God, drenched with God. With every breath we are infused with God.