Have you noticed how impossible it is to store up breaths for the future (just in case you need them later)?
Our most precious and fundamental need is to breathe, but this precious gift is only available in the NOW. We can only go a few moments before we need another draft of the lifegiving supply.
Breathing is an unconsciously driven process, but also one over which we can exercise our will, if we wish to–a metaphor for the very life we daily live. The pure mixture of gases that perfuse our entire being down to the tiniest receptive cell is an absolute miracle that we experience every moment:
- a Miracle that we choose to participate in and appreciate
- a Miracle we can ignore
- a Miracle can cut ourselves off from, the moment we hold our breath
So too with how we choose to live in this durable, miraculous little body that interfaces with the breathing world. Breath is our connection to all that is.
We breathe with nature. We breathe her and she breathes us. Our inhale is her exhale.
Inhalation itself is an exquisite mystery–it is an interchange between what is within and what is without. We expand as we draw in the exhale of the trees that unimposingly surround us.
We can easily ignore all of this as we plan our work week, try to figure out who will get the kids to dance practice tonight, and what to pick up for dinner on the way home. This is not to diminish the wonder of being present to the life we are living, but to expand our context of what it is to be alive. In most situations, we can take for granted the fact that life giving oxygen will always be available.
This is a profound miracle: What you most need is always there, as a universal supply.
We take 20,000 breaths each day. If we choose to, we can make a single one of those a conscious breath and appreciate the life giving nature of the Mystery that we inhale; recognizing that our very life is dependent on the Miracle of expanding our lungs from one moment to the next and taking in everything that is outside of us.
