I was in Austin, Texas for a few days before I really looked up at the sky. I saw churning clouds under a hot sun, a favorite object of contemplation of mine in the summer months. In New York City, the tall clouds create airborne ridges and peaks that put you at the floor of an enormous valley of your own imaging, the lowest layers of which are the concrete and glass facades that give you no long-view vantage other than skywards. It’s all up and down in New York, a continuum from you to the lowest edge of the sun.
Texas was not as flat as I expected, but you are acutely aware of its horizontal breadth when you fly in. Once on the ground, observing clouds becomes less about their stratospheric reach and more about their flow over the surface of the hot land. In a dry climate, those clouds are the most immediate river. But they are a river without banks, a river that floods so comprehensively that it’s nothing but the flood. Clouds suggest a vast oceanic current, alerting us to the easily forgotten fact that our atmosphere is a positive entity, a real presence of fluid, always mixing and changing and interacting. Clouds just allow this process to catch a little visible light, and pull back the curtain on a tense and temporary equilibrium.
At this one particular moment that I happened to look up, at a glance I saw a cloud communing with itself, arms expanding and contracting, regions withdrawing and or reaching beyond their capacity to cohere, this continent of vapor giving and taking from the invisible sea around it. A very hot day seems to stifle activity for the land-bound, especially humans, dogs, and the leaves of trees on a day with no breeze. But that direct draught of radiation — light, UV, infrared, all of it — into the atmosphere has just the opposite effect. The sky becomes an expansive reservoir of potential energy, pushing the balance of countless gaseous exchanges in one direction or another. Midday clouds and nighttime storms and hazes at dawn are all manifestations of this enormous exchange that flows around us all the time.
A cloud is not its own. It’s a greeting card from a chemical sea in which you make your whole life. There is no life beyond its boundary. I’m thinking now of the experience some astronauts describe in beholding the entirety of human life curved along the very top layer of a minor sphere of rock, and the terms of frankly spiritual awe it inspires in them. A part of this kind of awe is a sense of contingency, perhaps absolute contingency: we rely on this Earth for every aspect of our being, and without it we are really, truly without refuge. In a turn that is so self-serving that it is other-serving, since it finds that soft vein of reality where self and other, individual and society, human and Earth, are not separate at all, this kind of Earth-reverence becomes a motivation to serve, to act with compassion and energy and skill to protect and sustain that which has protected and sustained us.
In Buddhism, we call this “vowing to save numberless sentient beings.” It follows from the historical activity of the Buddha stepping off of his seat of enlightenment to engage the world. In Christianity, I would identify it as the source of a creation theology, one that names this fleshly, material life and world as Good, if challenging and inertial at times.
What the clouds show is that we needn’t go to space to experience a sense of awe-inspiring contingency. Astronauts might see that terra is not as firma as we think, and is in fact a small shelter of life in a dark cold chaos. Likewise, the realization that we swim about in a chemically active sea that is ever so finely balanced to a narrow band of conditions for this life to be possible, leads me to some combination of gratitude, contingency, and frankly, terror.
To be full of awe is to feel at least a little awful, and in the Bible, we can read a line describing fear of the LORD as awe, as well. To realize that the source and sustenance of your life is contingent is not sentimentality, meant to foster some shallow sense of ease. I experience it as a charge. The religious impulse must address the full range of human contingency, by raising up fundamental realities, the deep veins of our being, the structural truths of our lives. Brought into the materialist context of American life, that means saying basic facts like a mantra, until they start to change our choices — that is, until they start to inform ethical action. To wit:
- The air I breathe is active and present. It positively promotes my own life. It is not neutral, not background, but only becomes that when I take it for granted.
- Furthermore, its narrow balance is neither preordained not guaranteed. There is no reason that life should exist on this Earth, and no automatic break if we push our active chemical balance too far one way or the other. Balance — in chemistry, in ecosystems, and in political affairs and social relations — is descriptive and not normative. If things happen to be balanced, it’s not because they’re supposed to be.
- Once I realize this, life’s contingency comes home to me. I swim in a sea of my own making now, and really of our own making. The deep veins connect us.
“A single garment of destiny” binds us, Martin Luther King Jr. said. His witness is all the more crucial now, as we come into consciousness of how we are changing our ocean of air. To summarize two centuries of climate science: we’ve expanded its capacity to retain energy. Really, it is its own kind of awe-inspiring, to see how our impressive industry, the same tools of skill and effort we would rely upon to save all beings, has influenced so profoundly and so suddenly this sea of air in which we all swim.
And we expand King’s meaning to this whole fluid knit of Earth and air, recognizing we are not somehow separate from them, and all of their material and matter and energy. Earth-and-us are one intermingled system, always influencing and responding in a sequence that is endless in extension, across time and everywhere right now. Our relation to the Earth is itself a complex and active sea, and it’s one that we are, for now, quite lost in. Some among us drown as a result. Our compassion fails when we don’t look to see how our actions play out.
It was skill and effort that brought us here. And it is those qualities guided by compassion, that are our hope.
A single cloud can be a witness to this teaching, to this reality. It has its being in the vast dynamic exchange of the air, water, and dust and is in fact just an extension of that exchange. In the same way, we are a part of all of this. We can direct our actions best when we are clear-eyed, but we can’t always know the outcomes. This leads to a kind of modesty that informs our compassionate action, both to act with some caution and also to recognize that it’s not always up to us.
So I’ll breathe my air a little more deeply, moving the gratitude of such a largesse of life into the foreground of my day. Like my breath, it starts right at the tip of my nose, and is always there for me. I wonder how sensing this atmospheric contingency changes me? Knowing that the contingency of each breath is shared by all, and that we all have some active part to play in its sustenance, the tension in my chest softens, and air in me can once again flow freely.
