On Breathing

On exhale, she joked about how tattered her peace flags are as of late. On inhale, she told me about winter sowing. Breathing as a game-changer.

In those moments of entering the flow of changes I can make, a new and different peace arrived. It will soon be intolerable for me to live outside of that peace. It is then that the disco rainbow light from everything you have been trying to tell me cast its colors in the perfect spot. Your way to peace is not my way to peace but the peace itself saves, heals, and covers everyone.

The machines dig ten feet into the ground and pull up three different colors of soil. The process is more gentle than I thought it would be.

Attention as inhale. Attendance as exhale. This is the prayer trail now. I see your flags on the path; thank you for marking the way.

Ground, house and windows all tremble in unison with the dig-work. I don't know what the land will look like in the spring – how the sun slant will sweep the dirt – how the old oaks and pines will wave differently absent their expunged neighbors. When the workers left, I knelt in the piles of cold, calico dirt to sift it with my hands. I had made my peace with what is happening here so it was surprising when the damp, earthy, perfume of life took me to an immediacy of place, both now and into moments of sorrow in the past.

There is an wordless intimacy with the physical earth which activates an entire kaleidoscope of connections and longings, pleasure and pain. These interactions become conversations through which I am both consumed and released.

And in these dialogues
death is overcome
by the welter
of breathing
for real