To Breathe

To breathe is the quintessential act of humanity. The deepest profundity, yet deeper and beneath the very fabric of our consciousness, is a rhythm that defines the highs and lows of our lives. To live is a wide and ambiguous definition. To live fully and presently moment to moment somehow mystifies the greatest among us. Yet to live is always to breathe. Specifically and thoughtfully and yet intuitively and carelessly. To breathe is to live.

COVID-19 attacks the lungs. Suddenly, the rhythms we’ve grown accustomed to no longer saturate us with life. We gasp and starve like a salmon hooked on the end of a line, suspended in air, mouth opening and closing, gills expanding, but dying. There’s nothing else. No different way to suck in the life around us. No better way to live presently than to breathe in. And out. And in. And out.

A man I met once told me he was life. No one can monopolize life, I thought. We borrow it for a time and give it back. Who can own the frayed ends of his timeline? Who can decide when to take his first breath, or last? Sometimes newborns require an extra jolt outside the womb. The oxygen in their blood is no longer provided. They must breathe, and cry, and clear the snot from their nose.

But then I began to think of this young preacher who stood on a subway platform and talked about the name of the Hebrew god. The man’s name was Rob Bell and his god’s name was the very sound of breath, so sacred that the sound was never spoken aloud until us white men assimilated both its language and meaning. To breathe is to speak. And suddenly there’s clarity that through his first breath, life began, and his last breath shattered the very holiest of holy ground our rock offered him. The threads tore, and with them cut the umbilical cord from divinity to humanity. With a jolt, he cried out.

The same breath, the same sigh was both a release of the knot holding him to the ground and the cord to save us, the frayed end thrown from the side of a boat at sea, the ventilator to pump us full of breath when the disease of death has hooked us and left us parched for oxygen, our mouths opening and closing but nothing meaningful transacting.

Suddenly there was a new way to live, a new way to breathe, to be born twice, to gasp for air and cry out the snot in our nose. A rushing wind came that moved no air, the authors reported, and with it a fire that burned no oxygen, and a mouth that spoke to all people, a truth that confounded the wise yet gave understanding to the foolish.

The disease rages. Yet, the man still claims he is life, and to live must mean to breathe, to begin to match our rhythm with his. At first like the violent shock of a ventilator expanding our lungs with sheer pressure, it slowly becomes like a clumsy highschool dance as the boy matches his movement with the girl. Finally the rhythm intertwines: in, and out. In, and out.