I went on a journey last night, in a few hours I travelled very far. My body barely moved but I journeyed around the world.
My breath, like a little white flame with a sparkly tail, shot a few inches out of my mouth with a spunky and curious kind of flick, and then with great speed and a motion similar to that of a jellyfish pulsing through water, began to aviate it's way through Earth's atmosphere independent of my body.
It sailed through oceanic winds, drifted on lazy warm urban breezes, got sucked into many mouths... The nostrils of a chicken in an open green pasture. It slipped into the mouth of a woman resting on a hillside, did a simple somersault in her lungs and continued on its way. It was inhaled by many animals, many people, gasped up by building storms, weighed down by particles of water. Never destroyed or osmosed by the surrounding air currents, a sovereign little breath making a journey that was determined wholly by circumstance. None of it was difficult, all of it was interesting.
It slipped up the sides of the Himalayas. That was the culmination of its pilgrimage. The mountains glowed pink and blue, shafts of light illuminated facades coated in brilliant snow. Then it returned instantaneously, and I lay there realising that my breath is always journeying across the Earth. Every exhalation is a tiny throb, a small yearning, a mute prayer, a wish to be consumed, to be shared. Every breath is consumed, is shared, mingles with all air and passes through all lungs. Every breath is a sharp jab of chilled mountain air, is a heavy haze of noxious polluted metropolitan air, is the salty whip or lazy drift of air that rides on oceans, is the dusty hot burning air that tortures desert sand into rippling tides of blazing patterns; undulating furrows and crests repeated on and on. You don't need to think of yourself as separate from all this, and you can think of yourself as inseparable from all this.
My breath, like a little white flame with a sparkly tail, shot a few inches out of my mouth with a spunky and curious kind of flick, and then with great speed and a motion similar to that of a jellyfish pulsing through water, began to aviate it's way through Earth's atmosphere independent of my body.
It sailed through oceanic winds, drifted on lazy warm urban breezes, got sucked into many mouths... The nostrils of a chicken in an open green pasture. It slipped into the mouth of a woman resting on a hillside, did a simple somersault in her lungs and continued on its way. It was inhaled by many animals, many people, gasped up by building storms, weighed down by particles of water. Never destroyed or osmosed by the surrounding air currents, a sovereign little breath making a journey that was determined wholly by circumstance. None of it was difficult, all of it was interesting.
It slipped up the sides of the Himalayas. That was the culmination of its pilgrimage. The mountains glowed pink and blue, shafts of light illuminated facades coated in brilliant snow. Then it returned instantaneously, and I lay there realising that my breath is always journeying across the Earth. Every exhalation is a tiny throb, a small yearning, a mute prayer, a wish to be consumed, to be shared. Every breath is consumed, is shared, mingles with all air and passes through all lungs. Every breath is a sharp jab of chilled mountain air, is a heavy haze of noxious polluted metropolitan air, is the salty whip or lazy drift of air that rides on oceans, is the dusty hot burning air that tortures desert sand into rippling tides of blazing patterns; undulating furrows and crests repeated on and on. You don't need to think of yourself as separate from all this, and you can think of yourself as inseparable from all this.
