For a start, it is invisible. It can creep up out of nowhere and tickle the back of your neck, or throw you flat on your face. It has no shape, size, smell, taste or sound of its own. All its properties are borrowed, all our experience of it comes at second hand. We have nothing to work with but indirect effects. It is big enough and strong enough to tear the largest living things on Earth out by their roots, and yet it can seep through a hairline crack. Wind is elusive, shifty, fugitive, difficult to define--and impossible to ignore.
The wind may seem like a strange thing to write about. It might seem like writing about nothing at all, since wind itself is so ephemeral and substanceless. But wind, as described by naturalist Lyall Watson, may be the only thing worth writing about, its effect on our lives is so important. Without wind, there would be no birds, who rely on it for their migrations. There would be no plants, except perhaps at the margins of oceans and rivers--the interiors of our continents would all be desert. There would be no trade or communication between civilizations, without the wind to push boats across the sea. There would be no weather of any kind, because weather itself is wind, the movement of cold and hot masses of air around the world. And perhaps, even if these other things were true, we would lack spirits, or souls, those mysterious parts of ourselves that people of all civilizations have equated with wind or air.
Watson separates Heaven's Breath into five sections, each each matched to a different relationship: "Wind and Earth," "Wind and Time," "Wind and Life, ""Wind and Body," and "Wind and Mind." When Watson writes about the hard sciences, as in the explanation of the production of trade winds in "Wind and Earth" or his description of the way spiders migrate on wind-driven threads of gossamer in "Wind and Life," he seems to be highly knowledgeable and gifted in the skill of communicating complicated concepts in clear, engaging terms. Heaven's Breath might be one of the most readable non-fiction books I've ever read. Watson's prose, like the wind itself, is full of life: one of the most surprising arguments here is that the air itself is a kind of biome in which innumerable small creatures live by right of nature, not just here in the troposphere where we--gulp--breathe them into our lungs, but even moving about by the billions in the outer reaches of the atmosphere.
When Watson turns his attention toward human beings--in "Wind and Body" and "Wind and Mind"--Heaven's Breath surprised me by outlining my own relationship to the wind. Did you know, for instance, that your feet are typically 15 degrees Centigrade--or 60 Fahrenheit--cooler than your body's core? Or that the "wind chill factor" measures how wind whips your own "aura" of body heat away from your body? The human body, as Watson describes it, is incredibly sensitive to the vagaries of the wind, and so is the mind. He argues that times in which we often feel bad or anxious are really subliminal responses to the shifting of winds, which are themselves related to the magnetic fields of the earth. (One thing I learned from this book is that the human heart has its own magnetic field.) In extreme cases, Watson says, this relationship turns disastrous, as in the hot, dry fohn wind of the Alps that drastically drives up suicides. It's no wonder then, Watson argues, that many of the origin stories of human beings in core mythologies begin with wind.
I really enjoyed Heaven's Breath, although perhaps it needs a little updating since it was published in 1984. In one truly breathtaking passage, Watson acknowledges the possibility that carbon pumped by human industry into the atmosphere will likely lead to an increase in the world's temperature, but holds out optimism for the consequences:
Dust raised by human and natural volcanoes may be cooling Earth's brow, but everything else seems to be working toward a warmer world, one destined to be at least 2 [degrees] Centigrade hotter before another century has passed. If so, it will be warmer than the Early Medieval epoch between AD 1150 and 1300, which was one of the best in post-glacial times and seemed, with the lifting of storm winds and bitter winters, to give the whole world a rush of blood to the head.
Watson goes on to write about the wonders of the Medieval warm period: Viking colonies in Greenland, cathedrals in Europe, flowers in the Sahara. Even "People grew bigger and lived longer." This is, of course, amazingly wrong: climate change threatens to curtail human lifespans on an enormous scale, not increase them. But you have to give Watson credit for recognizing the possibility of global warming before many others, and despite the Pollyanna-ish optimism, Heaven's Breath is still worth reading in the era of climate change, because it understands how closely linked our lives--our bodies, our minds, our ecosystems--are to the weather.
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