Weekend from the Heart(h)
What if Breath was the Reason?
Remembering Life’s Sacred Living System. Returning to Aligned Living. Restoring the Collective.
Humanity spends much of its time seeking How.
How do we become successful?
How do we become healthier?
How do we become happier?
…. How do we solve this problem?
How do we build that thing?
How do we get where we are trying to go? ….
We spend far less time asking why.
Why are we here at all?
Why does life continue creating?
Why do forests grow and rivers flow?
Why does breath move endlessly between soil, ocean, tree, animal, and human?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why does life appear so determined toward relationship?
And perhaps the biggest question of all:
What if we have mistaken ourselves for the reason?
Because lately I have found myself sensing:
What if breath was the reason?
We breathe every moment of every day, and somehow we have decided to take it almost entirely for granted.
Yet breath is one of the most extraordinary forms of nourishment we receive.
More immediate than food.
More constant than water.
More essential than almost anything else we can name.
Every moment of our lives is carried by it.
And yet we rarely stop long enough to notice.
Breath is nourishment.
Not only for us.
For Life itself.
Plants breathe.
Forests breathe.
The oceans breathe.
Soils breathe.
The living world is not a collection of separate things inhaling and exhaling independently.
It is an intricate and ongoing exchange.
A great conversation of breath moving continuously through life.
And I find myself deepening into something even bigger.
What if we are not the intention?
What if Life itself is the intention?
What if BREATH is the reason?
What if breath is the way Life circulates through the universe, and all living things participate in that circulation?
What if we are not separate from the breath but expressions of it?
What if all things are created to benefit the existence of breath?
Participants within it.
Carriers of it.
For a long time humanity has imagined itself at the centre of everything.
History is filled with moments where we believed the world revolved around us.
That we were the destination.
The purpose.
The pinnacle.
(This could be another Copernican moment - Just as we once thought Earth the stationary centre of the Universe - we realise … )
Yet perhaps life is asking us to remember something gentler.
That we are not standing outside creation looking in.
We are participants within it.
Not owners.
Not controllers.
Participants.
And perhaps this changes how we relate to the world around us.
Because Life was never ours to take.
What if it was ours to nourish through our presence?
Every breath is part of an ancient lineage stretching back through forests, oceans, soils, stars, and the countless forms Life has taken across time?
The breath entering your lungs today has travelled extraordinary journeys.
Through trees.
Through oceans.
Through animals.
Through generations of people long gone.
Through the living world itself.
One breath.
Many forms.
And perhaps this is what I find most beautiful.
This deepens the reality of no separation. That what appears separate is not separate at all.
The breath moving through me is not mine.
The breath moving through you is not yours.
It belongs to Life.
And for a brief moment, we are entrusted with carrying it forward.
Nourishing through us - from us - to all …
If you find yourself with a quiet moment today, step outside.
Pause.
Take a breath.
And wonder where it has been before it arrived.
This made me pause. There is so much wisdom in something we so often take for granted 💚