Spirit is what moves us, or what we are moved by.
It is the invisible made semi-visible in language, an imaginative rendering of the fundamental mystery around selfhood. Who is the I? How can I think about the I (If I am fully inside the I)? What is the relationship between my body and my self? If my body dies, what happens to this ‘knower,’ this self that does not feel as though it is housed within the body, since it is able to both be and observe the being?
The etymology of ‘spirit’ is curious. Spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which means “breath, breath of god,” and “inspiration, breath of life, life.” There are no direct cognates of spirit, which has led some linguists to believe that the word is an onomatopoeic formation “imitating the sound of breathing.”
But there is a secondary meaning for spiritus: “disposition, vigor, courage, pride, and arrogance.” This twofold definition renders spirit both what defines us as human universally, and also as specific individuals. It groups us all as beings who breathe (and are therefore alive), and also what allows for our particular dispositions.
Think of all the ways we use spirit now, and their divergent associations. We say “she’s spirited.” We ask for spirits at the bar. We have rituals (depending on our faith) around the departure of spirit from the body. There is a cult classic movie called Spirited Away.
As English speakers in the 21st century, we’re primed to align life with breath. Following this logic, humans and animals are alive because they breathe, while things like rocks and rivers are inanimate because they don’t. But this is certainly not the only way to conceptualize the distinction between animacy and inanimacy.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer so beautifully explains in Braiding Sweetgrass, indigenous peoples of North America built “the grammar of animacy” into their language: everything of this world is animate and verbal, everything created by humans is inanimate, a noun. This much more holistic treatment of what qualifies life aligns with Thomas Berry’s saying that “we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”
So what are the conceptual consequences of our English word ‘spirit’?
A deep--and perhaps fearful--attachment to self. A foregrounding of the individual over the collective. Our idea of spirit is what protects us against the unimaginable non-being. Our spirit is who we are, how we move through the world, and what we cannot imagine losing. It is where we house everything known, the shape we’ve drawn around the shapeless.
As it came to be used in the 15th century, spirit is “the essential principle of something.” We may not know what that ‘something’ is, may not ever be able to mentally grasp what it means to live or die, but we nonetheless long to be essential, for the delicate thread of self to not be as inexplicable and distinguishable as we fear it might be.
Words - Finnegan Shepard www.finneganshepard.com
Photography - Mischa de Stroumillo www.mischadestroumillo.com
You and I are in a similar slipstream of thought... Love these thoughts.