Our most essential need is to breathe.

Most of us cannot wait more than a minute before we need another draft of the life sustaining supply.

But have you noticed how impossible it is to store up breaths for the future (just in case you need them later)?

This precious gift is only available in the NOW.

Breathing is an unconsciously driven process, but also one over which we can exercise our will, if we wish to.

The pure mixture of gases that perfuse our entire being down to the tiniest receptive cell is an absolute miracle that repeats with such frequency that we don’t even notice it.

Breathing is:

• a Miracle that we can choose to participate in and appreciate
• a Miracle we can ignore (but still benefit from)
• a Miracle we 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—this vessel that breathes the world and is breathed by it.   Breath is our connection to All That Is—a metaphor for the very life we daily live.

We breathe with nature.  We breathe her and she breathes us.   Our inhale is her exhale.

Inhalation itself is an exquisite mystery—an interchange between what is within and what is without.  We expand as we draw in the exhale of the trees that that work silently, generously, and unimposingly all around us.  

We can easily forget all of this as we plan our week, juggle getting the kids to dance practice tonight, and debate 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 moments, 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—A universal supply.

We take 20,000 breaths each day.  If we choose to, we can make any one of those a conscious breath by:

• Pausing to 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.