This podcast is about air, the thing that gives us life. Also the thing that fuels wildfires - like LA. It creates and it destroys. Both are equal for air. It’s a primordial force.

Originally published last Spring, I thought it was time to revive it. It’s one of my favorites and besides I didn’t have anything else ready. So it’s a rerun. Hey, even my Baptist preacher father used to do that.

Ok, so this is how it happened. I was riding my bike thru Brackenridge Park and feeling the wind on my face. Hey this is air, I thought, I’m moving thru air. There were some people walking nearby on the sidewalk, hey they’re walking thru air too, I thought as I rolled by them. An innocent thought, in a spontaneous moment but I started thinking about it. Air. Wow. And that’s how I started writing this post.

There are so many obvious things to say about air. It blows over us - the wind, it goes inside us - our breath. It’s everywhere - atleast from about 20,000 feet to sea level. Above that there’s not enough oxygen to sustain a person. Below that is underwater. There’s no air underwater. Plenty of dissolved oxygen though. And therein separates the men from the fish.

Air is invisible, so it doesn’t get recognized as a solid objective entity, like a car. I drive a red Kia Sedona minivan. Well I don’t really but probably somebody does. It’s invisible (the air) but if you don’t have access to it for more than a few minutes you’re dead. Then you won’t need it anymore.

How many things can you think of like that? Things that we totally depend on and totally take for granted, like air? I can list a few. This planet comes to mind and the biosphere that provides our food and sustains all the various forms of life. Our body, and it’s sensory organs - sight, hearing, touch, taste and then thinking about it all, making sense of it all. How many times do you think about thinking? I mean, probably ravens don’t do it. Not like us. They might have their own thoughts though. I’m not sure.

Like soil, air is unique to our planet (as far as we know). It was a long process of billions of years to get our air (that we do know). The first atmosphere was a bunch of hot obnoxious gases from volcanos: methane and ammonia and hydrogen sulfide and some nicer gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide, but no free oxygen to speak of.

Imagine half a billion years of earth history, 500 million years. That’s how long it took for things to cool down and for the water vapor to precipitate into oceans. Now we’ve got chemicals cooking under the waves and things being discovered. Now life has a chance to happen and populate the barren planet Populate it, it did and changed the gaseous envelope that clung to its surface in the process. What we call our atmosphere.

Photosynthetic algae, one of the earliest organisms to appear in the primordial oceans, was able to create free oxygen by inventing the amazing process of photosynthesis. This amazing process uses sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates (fuel), liberating free oxygen in the process, it wasn’t needed (but it would come in handy later for the more complex organisms that were yet to arrive). Over time (and there was alot of it) the oxygen in the ‘air’ went from basically zero to 20%, which is about what it is today.

The air in our atmosphere, today, as I’m sure you know, is 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and 1% other trace gases. Our air has been like this for about 200 million years. Atleast that’s what Google said.

In the Hindu scriptures, prana is that which imbues everything with energy, that which animates everything and gives life. It is hidden in the air, inseparable. We’re breathing prana, the divine essence of everything, if I got the story straight. That’s pretty wow.

I mean our first breath: we came alive, our last breath: we go bye bye. And in between we breathe constantly, never stopping. Unless you’re free diving on a coral reef off the coast of Mexico.

I used to be pretty good at it back then, breath-hold diving. I trained for it underwater in the cenote just off the beach. It was great feeling: free-diving, no scuba gear, no bulky, noisy equipment, just you and the massive ocean. I could stay underwater for three minutes but I clearly remember the feeling of that sweet breath entering my oxygen-starved body when I surfaced. I like breathing.

Air is good. I like breathing air. I was made for it. Thank God we have alot of it. And it’s free. What a great idea. Hope we don’t wreck it with car exhaust and everything else we dump in there. Then what would we breathe? Walk around with air tanks like we were on Mars? Yes, this car comes equipped with it’s own air supply that can last you for 500 miles. Oh, really? How much does that cost? Take it to get refilled like a propane tank. All our houses will be plumbed with clean air vents coming from the Acme Clean Aire Purifer unit outside our home. And on and on.

It’s just a little tiny bubble of air, I guess is what I’m saying, in a massive solar system on the edge of a massive galaxy. Alot of dark space around here. No air anywhere except on Earth. Our little bubble that bubbled up somehow.

music by Cacao Yoga in Vancouver Organic Ambient Folktronica | Downtempo | Tribal | Medicine Song, various tracks, thank you Tomoko and Koku

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Episode: https://rohn.substack.com/p/air-25b

Podcast: https://rohn.substack.com/podcast