Breath

is a word that wants us to live in the same way it lives . . .

Photo: © David Whyte

Breath is the very first thing we give to this world and the very last thing we are allowed to take from it. Breathing is what we do before we understand a single thing about our world, and the last thing we will do despite all of our hard-earned wisdom.

BREATH

is a word that wants us to live in our mouths in the same way that it can live in our own bodies: without undue effort, and left to itself, relying on the easy, rested, autonomic give and take of the body itself. Real rest is the breath simply looking after itself and looking after everything else as it does it. Breath is not only an invitation into the body but the essence of the way we already know how to live in that body. Easy, relaxed, breathing always leads to surprise: at how centred we already are, how unhurried we are underneath it all, how patient we never knew we could be. 

Breath is a word that breathes deeply of its own self, asking us in turn to breathe even as we follow its long, stretching vowel sound and its gentle, arriving tide of air that in the end, forms the sweet final sound of the word itself, flowing out of our bodies and into the waiting, listening world. Breath is a self-compassionate word that is difficult to pronounce harshly. In speaking the word breath, the last soft ending in the very last letters are like the sound of water coming to rest on a sloping beach, telling us in effect of the way our breath has reached within the word itself some shoreline upon which it will rest and then recede and return again, back into the very body that was so instrumental in its first creation. 

Breath is the very tidal word that carries the very essence of our very tidal identity, where just the act of saying the word, culminates in that momentary, invitational  silence at its end, out of which the next in-breath is naturally born. Physiologically we do not need to breath in, we just need to breathe out fully and the in-breath follows as natural as the body’s natural wish to go on living. We are tidal creatures; always giving and always waiting to receive; always arriving and always about to say goodbye: we begin in some form of silence, live through the breathing exchange of a given life and end again in another form of silence. We are here and we are somehow not quite, a coming and a going, and in every religious inheritance, breath is the essence of that understanding, of our passing through, of our poignant transience, the way we appear and disappear, breath is the essence of prayer.