Act from Awareness That Everyone Shares the Same Air - Connecting to Genesis

The word rakia, translated as "firmament" in many older Bibles and as "expanse" in some of the newer ones, refers to something “separating waters above from waters below.” Did our ancestors believe in a symmetry between ocean and sky, with the stars and other heavenly bodies swimming as it were in the waters above, which also would be the source of rain? The word for heavens, shamayim, has been suggested to be a compund of the words aish, fire, and mayim, water.

In our vastly different picture of the cosmos we see now that the atmosphere is but a thin film relative to the diameter of Earth, but that it protects us from outer space radiation and meteoroids, provides air for our lungs, regulates climate by its balance of green house gases, and is the medium through which the waters below in the ocean really do cycle to the waters above in the clouds. Moreover, as we breathe, the air connects our lungs to all other life on the planet and we exchange its molecules between all of our bodies.

It seems appropriate on the second day to honor this life-sheltering blanket.

Resources

Books and Other Non-Internet

Ellen Bernstein, The Splendor of Creation, p. 14-25
David Abram, "The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air," Chapter 7 of The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 225-260.

Organization Web Sites

"StoptheFlood! Addressing global climate change by changing our lives" calls on us to "make change a spiritual habit" at http://neohasid.org/links/stoptheflood/.