The air we breathe and the air that surrounds us is made up of the same matter that forms everything on the planet. Even though you can’t see the air, it is comprised of atoms, which form the building blocks of our physical world. In other words, air and nothingness are not the same things at all. And the wind, which is really air in motion, is something, too. How do you describe something you can’t see? Poets have been thinking forever about the difficulty of describing wind. Centuries ago, the Roman poet Lucretius wrote a long poem called On the Nature of Things, and he proved the existence of wind by asking if trees and leaves blow around during storms, which they do. And then he asked whether or not the trees could move by themselves, which they can't. Finally, the poet made his point by noticing that even though you can’t see the wind, you can see that it has physical presence because you can see the effect the wind has on things it touches.

The wind touches every continent on the planet. In many countries around the world, a large vocabulary exists just to describe the wind and its effects. Different kinds of winds do very different things. “Kona,” for example, is the name for a stormy, rain-bearing wind from the Southwest in Hawaii. Kona is a Polynesian word meaning “leeward.” Can you think of a few synonyms for “wind”? What’s the difference between “breeze” and “gale”? To answer the question, consider the difference in the wind’s effects described by the two words.

In many different languages, the words for wind carry meanings related to both human existence and philosophy. In Hebrew, the word for wind, or "ruach" (roo-ahck), means both breath and spirit. And in fact, wind is breath. We create a tiny gust of wind every time we inhale and exhale. Humans cannot separate themselves from the air since we depend on it to live, so “ruach” describes our physical and psychological tie to the idea of wind. We could even say that the wind blowing around the world is the planet’s way of breathing.