Living in the Presence of Air

..
so there they go
through the wind, the rain, the snow

wild spirits
knowing what they know...

Kenneth White, Late August on the Coast

That's the definition of the word 'aerobic': living in the presence of air. It reminds me of a phrase I read recently in Tim Ingold's book Being Alive to describe the person who moves beneath their own steam, who, in effect, wayfares : Engaged in the currents of the life-world. This, I guess, stands in stark opposition to those who do not wayfare, who rely instead on someone else or something else to fare the way for them, to those who have been disengaged and disconnected from their greater matrix of aliveness: that is, embroiled in the stasis of the workaday world. Where the former is aliveness, the latter is deadness. 

Aerobics, though we may all be acquanited with the word and the organised aerobics of gymnasiums and morning television, is a way of life, and a way of being-in-the-world that is conducive to understanding that world as a natural self-organising phenomenon (into which we are rooted and out of which we flower). Aerobic living gives way to an understanding in the flesh of what the Jains of India and the Celts of Europe (as well as many other intelligent-sensitive beings) called inter-dependent co-arising, the dependence of all things on other things in order to grow and cycle. In the modern-day West however, atomised and segregated beyond repair in some cases, we have lost touch with this inter-dependence and collaboration. There have been many causes of this: beginning some say in the 1600s with the dawn of modern science and Cartesian dualism, swiftly continuing with Newton's mechanistic view of the universe and the triumph of reason and logic over other ways of knowing, and the prevailing propaganda put forward by an overly scientistic society which no longer believes in God (because it no longer has the time nor the inclination to work out what 'god' actually stands for). Any sensitive, conscientious scientists that have come along - Goethe, Schauberger, Schwenk, Sheldrake, Capra, who refuse to accept the possibility of separating the observed from the observer, and put forward corresponding theories, are either dismissed entirely as crackpots, or lauded and then quickly forgotten about. As the wandering Scot Kenneth White states in his essay The Crisis of Reason:

If this modernity has know triumphs it has now reached a stage where, for example, scientists are no longer philosophers, but mere laboratory artisans (hence a science with very little living sense to say to people), where philosophy has degenerated into the mere history of philosophy as a succession of 'schools' one plods through before giving it all up to become a logical positivist, and where psychological distress, based ultimately on the loss of world, is rife and rampant.

Science is all about separation after all, con-science about recognising the connections.

At any rate, getting out into the air, on the air, on a bicycle is a fine way to learn of physics and metaphysics, of science and conscience. Science without conscience is as Rabelais states in Gargantua, the soul's perdition. But of course, scientists have never bothered to work out what soul means. The lack of meditative-contemplative thinking leads one away from the great questions, and the great 'abstracts' like god, soul, love, and leads one instead into the domain of fantastical thinking and fantasy. Cycling aimlessly in the countryside, up to the tops of hills, and along the shores by the sea, emphatically not across the earth but in and through her, is itself an act of intercourse that is not entirely dissimilar to making love. There is union, there is intimacy, there is penetration.

As Henryk Skolimowski writes in Living Philosophy: 'Human beings are just like plants; they can only grow well by working the elements of life into their beings'. Whilst, presumably, at the same time, working out the nonsense.

In a world that is increasingly becoming obsessed with its own narcissitic meanderings, and its own outsorcery, where the pandemics of obesity and stupidity can be easily prevented through a more sensitive and intelligent nurturing and education, where war is a constant headline wherever you look, where security is the buzzword of nations with enemies, maybe living in the presence of air and lifting the lid off our self-made tombs, 'making love' (not war) by riding your bicycle, is not such a bad idea.