Daniel Conway, Answering the Call of the Wild
The old German cobbler Jakob Bohme once wrote in his obscure treatise on God that one needs to pass through hell in order to appreciate heaven...
The dialectic of paradise is such that one needs to have tasted hell in order to know the taste of heaven. And it is here, that taste, in the air around us, in that freshness that blows into our nostrils and through our whole bodies.
Glasgow is an airy place no doubt, but not all places have that vitality of breathing. When I lived on the Mazovian lowland in Warsaw, an area known for its flatness and lack of undulations, there was a distinct windlessness that entered the proceedings. The flow of fresh air just wasn't there as it is here in the Glasgow shires. The topography and the hemmed in-ness of Warsaw meant that wind was something of a luxury. Summers could get awfully muggy and close, and there were times, in spite of the lovely warmth and sunshine, when I prayed for a cool breeze.
Living in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Libya, I have realized that fundamental dialectic of heaven and hell. I can now see greater Glasgow, with its gentle hills and moorland, its proximity to the highlands and the islands, its gentle rains and winds, its shifting light and cloudcover, as that heaven. Who wouldn't, having felt the pain of fifty degree sunlight burn your skin? Or the suffocating humidity of a Jizani soiree in south-western Saudi Arabia? There are life-giving properties here that you just do not have in certain locales around the world. The west of Scotland where I live and breathe is particularly endowed with these qualities.
Yet one must learn to receive the rain, to welcome the wind.... and to understand it. And the best way to under-stand anything is to stand under it. To feel it. To develop a relationship with it as one might with another human being. These elements are your relatives before any of your own kind; they allowed you and your human relatives to emerge. These elements, then, are your greater relatives that precede all others.
However, we are been covered up and coated over with all manner of fashions, so as to prevent this tuning in to the weather. It's probably why our delusions regarding global warming are still prevalent: we cannot feel the weather anymore. Our lives are too air-conditioned. Our brains too washed with over-chemicalized shampoo.
It's the difference between being awake and being alseep - between synergetic Being and soporific Being. All these wind and rain proof tops surely bode no good for the oneness of organism and environment. I am the rain, a wise creature once croaked. And I am. For without it I would not exist.
Our psyche, after all, is a function of the air that blows through us, that feeds and nourishes us. This is the word that is used to translate the Hebrew word nephesh from the Creation story in Genesis 2.7:
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
The soul emerges out of the air and the rain and our interdependence on them. Indeed, soul may well be this deep reality that nothing can exist without everything else. That I am both that nothing and that everything else. That to confuse this closed bodily form (or this fine-tuned ego) with I is to make a grave mistake and launch oneself onto the path of a slow self-destructuring where one ineluctably becomes a dislocated fragment, an inauthentic mask imposed upon a faceless origin.
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