Every-air.

Everywhen.

The air is never empty. It is thick with what we cannot see—whispers of combustion, dust from distant lands, fragments of things that once were whole. You breathe in, and the world enters you. Some of it will stay.

The larger ones— particulate matter at around 10 micrometres, PM₁₀, coarse and blunt—are the easiest to notice. A breath of roadside dust, a gust of pollen, a swirl of ash from a fire long since tamed. These particles land at the body’s thresholds: the nose, the throat, the bronchi that branch like river deltas. The body is wise to them. It builds defences—mucus, coughs, sneezes: the wet guardians of the respiratory tract. You might feel them in a roughness at the back of your throat, a heaviness in your chest after a day spent in windblown fields. They can be expelled, mostly, carried away on the tide of breath.

But the finer ones slip through. Particulate matter under 2.5 micrometres in diameter – PM₂.₅—are too small to be caught, too light to settle. These are the particles of woodsmoke, of diesel exhaust, of the slow, invisible unravelling of cities and industries. They weave into the alveoli, the delicate air sacs where breath becomes blood, where oxygen dissolves into the rivers of your body. These particles do not stay at the threshold. They pass through, crossing into the bloodstream, riding the currents that lead to the heart, the brain, the places we do not think of as holding breath. They can spark inflammation, tighten the pathways of breath, whisper their presence in aching heads and lungs. They are not expelled so easily.

And then there are the ultrafines. PM₀.₁—so small they move like ghosts, slipping past every defence. The air of burning plastic, of brake pads worn down to nothing, of industry’s final, silent remnants. They do not settle. They pass through barriers that are meant to keep the body safe. Through the lungs, into the blood, and farther still—crossing into the brain, the nerves, the womb. They move through us unnoticed, until they become something other.

We speak of air as if it is only breath, but it is also memory. It carries what has been burned, what has been broken, what has been left to drift. It enters us as inheritance, and we do not choose what it brings.

Breathe in. The body takes what it must. Breathe out. Not everything leaves.

We are in the air.

Every-air.
Everywhen.
The air is always moving. It shifts in unseen currents, folds itself into pockets of warmth and cold, rises and falls with the turning of the earth. It carries ash, and dust, and salt from the sea. It carries the breath of those who lived before us.
And now, we ask it to carry more.
Summers grow longer, heat pressing harder into the soil. The forests dry at their roots, the rivers shrink to shallow ribbons, and the air, always moving, begins to fill with the weight of what has burned before. Smoke before the fire—it lingers, held in memory, tucked into the atmosphere, ready to return.
Storms gather over distant oceans, thicker now, stronger, their winds reaching further. They lift dust from places where the rain no longer falls, carry it across continents, let it settle into lungs that have never known the taste of another country’s earth. The cities choke first, but even in the valleys, even in the quietest corners, the air does not stay clean.
The body does not know how to prepare. It only breathes, as it always has, drawing in whatever the wind has brought. A child gasps on a summer’s day too thick with heat and particles unseen. A grandmother finds her breath shorter with each season. The air does not belong to one place. What rises in the north will fall in the south. What burns in one summer will return in the next.
The air carries it all. And the body takes it in.
We are in the air.

Every-air.
Everywhen.
It moves without borders, without walls, carrying breath from one body to another, stitching the world together in something unseen, something shared.
A breath drawn in Mumbai carries the salt of the Arabian Sea. A sigh released in New York drifts toward the Atlantic. A child exhales laughter in the Derwent valley, and though no one will ever trace its path, the molecules will travel, unseen, unfelt, to be inhaled by another – conspired matter.
The air does not forget where it has been. It holds the memory of volcanoes, of forests before they fell, of the breath of ancestors long gone. It carries whispers of burning coal, of diesel fumes threading through city streets, of factories exhaling into skies already heavy. It carries what we give it.
A matter that does not touch all bodies the same. Some lungs breathe deeply, unthinking, untouched. Others take in the air and find it to be sharp and unkind. Their air (this air) is the sum of our choices, the weight of our industries, the depth of our dependence.
We make the air, and the air makes us. Co-constitution of bodies and breezes.
We are in the air.

52.84 air nautical miles from here.
June 2016.
The air is shaped by what we ask it to carry – the sky now inscribed with power, with conquest, with the human insistence that atmospheric processes must bow to profit, to the will of those who command the clouds.
In the highlands (once here, still elsewhere), planes lace the sky with silver iodide, coaxing clouds heavy with the promise of rain. The particles rise unseen, slipping into vapor, shifting the balance between waiting and falling. Water condenses, droplets swell, and below, a dry land opens itself to rain that might not have come.
But the sky does not give without consequence. Where one valley drinks deep, another goes dry. Who holds the balance between abundance and barrenness? Witnesses whisper, who stole the clouds, and stories begin to take seed. Conspiratorial speculation in contemporary mythology, enmeshed with environmental truth. One dead, three missing. Flash flooding. Pollutant triggering. Unintended consequences, silver bullet dodging.
The air carries all things—gas, greed, smoke, despair, dust, memory, hope.
We are in the air.

107.02 air nautical miles from here.
February 2025.
It begins with dry lightning—silent, sudden, striking earth already brittle with drought. The land holds the spark in its undergrowth, coaxing flame from stillness. Days later, the fire moves, tearing through ninety thousand hectares, swallowing Zeehan’s edges, darkening Corinna’s sky.
Before the flames arrive, the air has already thickened. Smoke creeping in as a visible haze – eyes watering, throats burning. Fine particles slipping past closed doors – lodging deep in lungs, breaths growing tight. A mother kneels before a child with red-rimmed eyes, her voice soft but urgent: Breathe through your nose, my love. Small breaths. Small breaths.
Emergency warnings measure the air, reducing hazard to numbers. How can a number can capture the weight of smoke inside a chest? The sting of breath turned foreign. Inhalers empty too quickly, as hospitals fill with the quiet panic of oxygen denied.
In time, the fire dies, but the body does not forget. The lungs remember the way air can turn against them. Weeks pass, but the coughing does not. Nights come where someone wakes, gasping, reaching for air they cannot trust.
We are in the air.

Launceston, 86.95 air nautical miles from here.
New Norfolk, 13.70 air nautical miles from here.
Snug, 11.67 air nautical miles from here.
July 2000.
Wood heater rituals. Hands stacking kindling in neat pyramids, paper crumpled just so, a match striking in the half-light of an early winter morning. The first lick of flame, the gentle crackle, the room slowly filling with warmth. Outside, the cold waits at the door, thick as fog, biting at the edges of permeable windows.
There is comfort in the glow, in the way this heat unfurls into a home. People speak of it in fond tones – nostalgic, reverent. There’s nothing like wood heat, he says, stretching hands toward the stove, exhaling steam into the air. The fire is a heart, a hearth, something primal and right.
Inside, particles seep into the room through cracks in the seals. Flood when the burner is opened. Damp wood and smouldering combustion exacerbate the release. Outside, tendrils of smoke rise from chimneys – curling, blackened whispers slipping through streets, tucking into valleys, cumulative and heavy. A weighted winter blanket. By morning, the community is smothered in it, the smell of last night’s fires lingering in clothes, in hair, on skin.
We are in the air.

Cape Grim, 177.82 air nautical miles from here.
May 2016.
At the edge of the world, we have long felt safe in the purity of our air. Cape Grim stands against the Southern Ocean, a sentinel measuring the breath of the planet, drawing in air that has travelled vast distances since last touching land. Here, the atmosphere has long held its baseline—pristine, untarnished, a reflection of past atmospheres.
But now, numbers climb. Come down for air.
400 parts per million. Then more. Then more. Carbon crosses the threshold, a line once distant, now breached. No longer a warning, the air is rewritten. It reads of a natural cycle pushed to the brink, stressed and disrupted by our limitless hunger for power – of carbon once stored in geospheric and biospheric bodies, now becoming-fuel, becoming-sky. It reads of a thickening atmosphere, pressing heat back toward earth, feeding storms, shifting seasons.
For us, it is slow, this transformation. Too slow to be felt in a single breath. But in the deep time of this planet, it is an instant—an exhale of carbon, a shift so brief in the story of the Earth, yet unprecedently dramatic. The wind that rushes over Cape Grim carries its quiet truth: we have already stepped across the line.
And yet, we still breathe. Come down for air.
We are in the air.

Here.
March 2025.
The wind moves like breath, drawing the past into the present. It carries pollen from flowers that have long since withered, salt from waves that crashed before memory. Smoke rises from fires that are now extinguished, particles remain – drifting, waiting, settling into the bodies of those who have never seen the flames.
The air is full of ghosts.
We are in the air.