Infinite Air

Preface (for those who are new to my songs and stories):

I admit that my songwriting is really nerdy, but it’s not without purpose. Nature’s metaphors and symbols give me compassion for the human condition, and remind me of life’s resilience. As such, every nature-nerdy song is written to keep my heart and hope alive as I find my way through these trying times.

To that end, this is post is divided into three sections:

1. In The Story Behind the Song I share about the challenge that the song is addressing.

2. In The Science Behind the Song I share the nerdy details of the nature-metaphor (or symbol) that speaks to the challenge.

3. In The Gift of the Song I share how the nature-metaphor (or symbol) supports the challenge, and how my art amplifies its benefit.

Now let’s get into it:

My love as a human has been much more fickle than I like to admit.

From the scientific perspective, it makes sense. Love, on a biological level, evolved to support humans in social dynamics, sorta keeping us together while we’re goin’ through it. With oxytocin, love gives us good-feelings. Then, with dopamine, love keeps us going.

That being said, the love that’s connected to oxytocin and dopamine is only produced when we feel safe. Indeed, as soon as fear enters the picture, both dopamine and oxytocin do a 180, creating avoidance1 and aggression2 rather than making us caring.

As such, on a physiological level, love is absolutely conditional: if you make me feel good, I love you. If you hurt me, I don’t.

What’s more, human love also seems to be transactional, where the extent to which someone meets our needs is often checked off lists of lovability. Check: my leg hair’s impeccably shaved. Check: he wears big-enough socks. Check: this year she’s been so well behaved that she won’t find coal in her box.

The problem is that though unconditional love is so tough to give, we all still need it. It’s what makes us feel safe throughout the growing pains of being human -in which we’re all liable to unintentionally hurt something. Indeed, without unconditional love, we’re all prone to cover up our mistakes, terrified of exposing our flaws, and perpetually ashamed.

Sound familiar?

In a world of swiping left and right, and folks being canceled for the rest of their lives, the concept of unconditional love feels like a fairy tale sometimes: nice to imagine, but not a reality.

So, it’s not surprising that so many of us feel so lonely34; I certainly have been. In fact, loneliness has gotten so intense in my life that there have been times when I didn’t want to live anymore.

But thankfully, unconditional love has found me, though how it’s come is a total mystery. Right up there with great scientific wonders like the origin of life, unconditional love is not easy to understand or describe.

And yet, here we still are. Without it I don’t think we would’ve have gotten this far. Surely we would’ve already blown ourselves up, like supernova stars.

Yet, despite the Doomsday Clock being to set to strike midnight in just minutes, we have persisted.

So, at the risk of sounding unscientific, I’d say this Love is miraculous.

It has been for me, anyway. Clearly bigger than me, if left to my own devices I might still be stuck in a puddle of grump, plugged and pouting with a lump in my rump. I might still be frozen in a mirror of rage (I still get defensive when I feel afraid). My heart still gets weak when I’m in pain, and when I’m overwhelmed, love can still feel very, very (and I mean super-dooper) far away.

But somehow, this Love still comes to me every day. From the very first moment that I wake, though it sometimes takes hours or days, this Love finds a way to say:

“I cherish you through all the joy, and all the pain.”

As such, it’s this Love that I aim for in my life. It’s this Love that teaches me how to be patient and kind. It’s this Love that guides me to care when I’m scared. It’s this Love that helps me to stay here:

for you.

That being said, Check-list Love can still be tempting as standards in life do have their place, and there are some games that require an ace. Some recipes do call for precision. Some missteps will end in collision.

As such, it is important to have boundaries in relationships.

So how do we keep our hearts open as our walls go up?

With the fickle human heart, how do we stay true to this Love?

It’s a question that’s confounded humans for hundreds of generations, birthing many of the world’s most effective practices.

In my life, I’ve found great help from creative reflection.

With that in mind, here’s the science behind the element of this song, that helps me remember to keep my heart on.

As unstable and impermanent as life can be, some things are quite sustaining. Air, for example, is mighty consistent.

Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to come into love when I focus on breathing; when everything’s up in the air, the air continues giving.

So here’s some nerdy facts on how air sustains through all its endless factors of change:

First of all, what is air?

According to Oxford Language (on Google), air is “the invisible gaseous substance surrounding the earth, a mixture mainly of oxygen and nitrogen.”

Which is to say: it’s not nothing.

Both oxygen and nitrogen enter the air through biological cycles. Nitrogen is released from bacteria that converts nitrates (in the soil) into nitrogen gas (in a process that’s called denitrification5, but don’t worry- I won’t go into all that). Oxygen enters when plants exhale it during photosynthesis (a process that, I’d assume, most folks understand enough for our purposes. But, did you know that the tiniest photosynthetic organism on Earth is an ocean plankton that produces up to 20% of our oxygen, which is more than all the tropical rainforests6???).

Anyhoo, for our purposes, what matters is to recognize that, though invisible, air is made of particles. The amount of particles that air has within any given space is called air density.

With this in mind, the particles of air are subject to gravity. Air pressure, therefore, is the accumulated weight of all the particles within the air (in a vertical column) over a given area. As such, when air has greater density (more particles), it also has greater weight -and higher pressure. Consequently, air pressure and air density are always directly proportional to each other (watch a neat graphic video about air pressure and density here).

With that in mind, there are two main factors that impact air pressure and air density:

1. Temperature7: heat causes air particles to expand. This is because heat is a form of energy. So, when the particles of air get more energy (through heat), they start moving. As they move around, they take up more space, causing them to spread further apart. With more space between particles, there’s fewer particles within a given space. Therefore, the air becomes less dense (which also means that it has less pressure).

2. Elevation: When air is closer to the Earth’s surface, gravity pulls air particles closer together. Then, as air gets further from the surface of Earth, gravity’s effect gets weaker. This means that in higher elevation (where gravity has less force on air), air particles spread out more. This makes air less dense in higher elevations (which also means that air has lower pressure in higher elevations).

These two qualities of air, density and pressure, form the foundations for understanding all the important phenomena that’s related to air, for example:

1. Why hot air rises: Because air is less dense when it’s warm, it’s more buoyant. This is because “gravity pulls cooler, denser air toward the Earth’s surface. As the denser air reaches the Earth’s surface, it spreads out and undercuts the less dense air, which in turn forces the less dense air up and into motion, causing it to rise.8” In other words, hot air rises as cool air sinks.

2. How wind is formed: When different areas of air have different pressure, an air pressure gradient is formed. Wind is created when the pressure gradient force “tries to equalize pressure differences ...[which] causes high pressure to push air toward low pressure.” The greater the difference in pressure, the stronger the wind.

3. Why clouds tend to form higher in the sky: as heat evaporates moisture into vapor, the warm (and moist) air rises. But, as it rises in elevation, it spreads out. As it spreads out, it cools9 (this is because the process of expansion uses energy, and less energy means less heat). This cooling (called adiabatic cooling10) causes water to condense into clouds (though fully understanding all of this also requires a good understanding of dew point and relative humidity. But that’s a whole other story).

Though the list of air phenomena could go on and on, that’s enough to convey what’s most meaningful for me in this song, which is to marvel at the fact that even as air gets more or less dense, it’s still there for me when I’m stressed. Whether I’m at the top of the mountain or in the depths of the valley, the air stays steady.

That being said, it can get dirty. Volcanoes, smoke, smog (and other stuff like dust) can clog the air up (making it much less appealing to breathe). But, even then, air is resilient -it even has its own purification system! Through a process called -wait for it- photochemical oxidation, a molecule in the atmosphere, called hydroxide (OH), helps break down pollutants11, which makes them more water-soluble for the cleansing process of precipitation12.

Which is to say: air needs assistance with cleaning itself out, for which wind and water are a big help! In a process called dry atmospheric deposition13, pollution particles are cleansed from the air by gravity and wind. Then, in wet deposition, water helps clean the air in one of two ways:

1. Clouds use pollutants as condensation nuclei (which are the particles that water holds on to when creating clouds). The fancy name for this is: in-cloud scavenging (or rainout).

2. Falling raindrops collect pollutants to carry them to the ground (which is called below-cloud scavenging, or washout).

But deposition isn’t the only help that air receives when it’s gotten dirty. Let’s not forget about plants and microbes (who also do their fair share of the cleansing). Plants help the process of photosynthesis when they absorb carbon dioxide14. Microbes also do their part by eating pollutants to survive15.

All that being said, this Love, like the air, is made to endure; under high and low pressure, it is secure.

Though my human heart can be as fickle as the wind, shifting with the climbs and slides of valleys and mountains, this Love keeps surrounding us, patient and promised-

May this Love fill you with an everlasting presence.

It’s not always easy being human, but it sure does help to sing through it! In a mix of music, metaphor, and ecology, every song and story affirms the heart of our nature through all of life’s weather and wonders.

Hear More Love Songs to Our Nature

In trying times, I look to the world around me for reflections to keep my heart going, then I anchor them in little ditties. Check it out:

Love Notes to Our Nature

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