Breath


This morning I feel the shortness of breath that comes with anger at and despair of humans’ unfeeling actions. I need the massage of breath, immersion into the present, into feeling.

Prepare the space and the soundtrack. Lay the yoga mat and play Jon Hopkins’ musical cycle Ritual. It follows a seasonal familiarity—repetitions with a cinematic development. It is the earth around the sun, birth to death, past and future in a forty minute present. A yoga practice; a beach walk; a writing session.

 

part i – altar

A bell rings a continuous echo, an arrival into breathing body, into ocean. Within and without, the air moving through me and into sky, rain, ocean. Starting at the head balanced on the top of the spine, small manipulations in the three planes that hold us in balance—down and up in the infinity of verticality; turning right to the disappearing past, and left to the unknown future, the horizontal timeline; tilting ear to shoulder, the doorway, framed in the present. It is a cottage craft, this careful unravelling of the annoyances, that teases out the fables in the fascia, the legends in the ligaments, the secrets of the sinews. This personal yoga sequence I have honed over many years can play itself through my body without my brain having to claim ownership. Opening the joints down the arms, rippling through the vertebrae, then running back up from ankles, knees, hips to dive further in to abdominals, organs, bones. All the time the breath deepening, the forehead softening, the fire kindling.

 

part ii – palace/illusion

The transition is seamless. Hard to pinpoint the moment but feeling the shift, from child to adolescent. My feet dropping into detail of beach, the rhythm of traverse within an enormity of tempos. High pitched streaks of clouds sing an inaudibly high note over the pulses of plump puffs. A gull runs a siren through the stave. Shell lays open like lungs. Wave fingers bowing the beach in rising progressions. My skin begins to purr. I’m striding in my bathers, feeling giddy, reckless. Letting sun and breeze fizz my edges. Jellyfish, those half moons beached as if fallen directly from the night sky. I clock them like summers gone by, recall the surprise of their demise between my toes. Butterflies coming to land. Have they crossed the ocean? A crossing as a lifetime, reaching land at the moment of transformation.

 

part iii – transcend/lament

Building up from the earth, the prop of the metatarsals grounding the push skyward of the interlaced palms. Balancing my feathered torso on elbow wings, the valley drops away below me but the up draught of navel to spine lets me hover. The poles reverse, Arctic skull becomes Antarctic as femurs sprout forest, hamstring foliage, big toe fig tree root. Then the axis swings up into seated woman, simultaneously reaching and resting. It is a small shift now to the vertical, into the oppositional pulls of stratosphere and tectonic plate. Tree pose adds the third to this balance, palms matching the press of sole of foot into thigh. I am at once moving outward and inward, anchored in this moment.

 

part iv – the veil

The wind picks up. It uses my hat to cover my eyes, a guess-who game. I take off the hat and let the air dance my hair like branches. Dragonflies join the barn dance. Two hold each other tight and speed off together. An insect elopement. The shoreline becomes ponds and shrubbery, pulling me off course and reminding me of the invisible below. Small pieces of sea grasses stick like confetti to my ankles. A dog with different coloured eyes stops me and circles close but darts off again. Next time will be our third meeting. Rule of three she might let me touch her. A girl with crimson hair gives me a quick double take as she passes. Swimmer going nowhere against the southern push, that tidal insistence that carries sand to Semaphore and my child self too far from my parents.

 

part v – evocation

Something drops in. I can’t distinguish breath from blood flow. Climbing now, my animal all four-legged traversing through the landscapes. I am glacier, canyon, hawk. Warrior, half moon, lotus. I am Durga, Kali, Saraswati. Stars shoot past. My body emitting signals, carving civilizations, honouring ancestors, overthrowing dynasties. A bow ready to release its longing and strike inspiration. This pilgrimage is breaking into a run, into a chatter of monkeys.

 

Part vi – solar goddess return

The return journey is pushed by the building northerly, wrapping my hat to my head like a gloved hand. The music is a noon sun, pumping hot foreboding like a predator overhead. I close my eyes and push forward. The ocean prods and pulls at me, speeding back and forth across my ankles like a teenage drag race. I allow myself occasional flashes of what’s ahead before dropping back into feeling. I think about the heights of emotion, giving myself permission to be angry, to grieve, to feel deeply and across time and space. For a moment I see the death of every creature and am overwhelmed.

 

part vii – dissolution

And then it’s over. I’ve reached stillness. That ultimate motion. Breathing in to the palms of my hands, I am standing all golden and statuesque like a Buddha on a mountain top. And the cycle begins again but it’s the next life. Just energy recirculating through the universe of the salutation. Affection as the palms meet at the heart; opening my chest to change; folding into activity; diffusing light with the bend of my knee; moving in the sky of downward dog; pressing down into the nourishing soil; containing the universe in the small of my back; finding the ray of light inside the pyramid; kneeling on the way to godliness; stepping into the production of everything; arching into worship; returning to standing in lustre. The continuity of that high note rolls inside my breath like the world revolving, lighting my body from a sun within.

 

part viii – nothing is lost

Looking down at my feet as I walk across the sand, I see the glitter, the glints of universe fragments, talismans of lives past. She isn’t lost. Her last breath moved her energy into the air around her, and then into my lungs, then blood, then exhalation. The ashes of her body into the ocean in glittering clouds. She is here, and there, and there. Imagining a universe of lives, of multiple energies, existing in one gleaming speck of sand. I reach the steps back up from the beach, where I once cast her last handful into the ocean and she emerged as a pod of dolphins.

 

 


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