"as though to breathe were life. Life piled on life were all too little." – Alfred Lord Tennyson

   One of my dearest friends can no longer take a breath without the help of an oxygen tank. For her, there is no such thing as breathing the way most of the rest of us do. The idea of a healthy breath is especially precious in her memory.

   We reach for our first breath even before we take our mother's milk. Those who linger in their last days signal by their changed breathing when they are close to the end.

   Caregivers often attend our first breaths and our last ones. They are present for some of our most painful exhaling.

   Members of the Inuit tribe (some know them as Eskimos) have many words for snow. We could benefit from more words for breath.

   There are the gasps of runners, the slow breathing of sleep, the passionate rhythms of love, the breaths of fresh air we treasure, the aroma of food.

   We are even urged on Labor Day and on other occasions to rest by "taking a breath."

   Poet Sharon Olds touches the quality of our lives as she recollects her life at age seventeen:

"…her breath in the house 
at night, puff, puff, like summer 
cumulus above her bed…" 

   Tennyson yearned, like all of us, for a life that was more than breath. If all we do is breathe then what is the point of our existence?

   We thrive only when we breathe Love.

   Eckhart Tolle says that every time we complain, we are seeking to inflate our ego by exhaling our superiority. We are, as we exhale negativity, suggesting that we are better than whatever we attack.

   What happens to the energy within us and around our world if we inhale the negative and transform it to the positive?

   What if we breathe to the rhythm of Yes?

-Erie Chapman

Photograph – Mother & Child #2 – copyright erie chapman 2010