Breathless

The wind between the lines

Breath is the only autonomic function we can control on command. Part of the autonomic nervous system (both sympathetic and parasympathetic), breathing is a simple in/out cadence that keeps us alive and properly oxygenated. The typical length of time a human can survive without oxygen is 4-5 minutes, although one (very young) person survived underwater for sixty-six.

This essay may take a little of your breath. Let’s breathe through it together.

Sit in a comfortable position, somewhere calm. Chair, sofa, bed, your backyard, top of a mountain, wherever you’d like. Turn your phone ringer off. Relax. Slow your breath until you feel your entire body soften.

Now, take a deep, slow breath. And hold.

The heat suffocates. Your body is an encased ensemble of flesh, blood vessels intertwined with organs, tendons tied to bones, skin pulled over muscle. When the heat rises, your systems begin to fail. You don’t sleep at night and you can’t go out during the day. You can’t breathe and you can’t think. But you know the war is coming.

Seven years later you still can’t breathe, but now the heat comes from the bombs, and the noxious air from the sewage running down the streets and the piles of rotting flesh. Pieces of the little bodies of children from the rubble, carried away by hungry dogs. Satan himself burns with shame.

They will take away the public breath of anyone who dares question the evil they wreak upon your land. Your people are a nuisance, and you are all terrorists by association. Your lives, your dreams, your flesh and blood are worth less than the dust they turn your cities into. Paid for by our taxes, held hostage by a political system we have all somehow agreed to live by.

Exhale.

Take a deep, slow breath. Now hold, but longer this time.

A fierce, musclebound arm is squeezing your neck. It’s an authoritative arm, trained in military-style techniques. You’re slammed to the ground, which never gives way, this ground that you know so well. Your world starts to dim. You try to speak, but only three words leak out.

Eleven times. “I can’t breathe.” Eleven. Times. The color of your skin, the history of your race, intimidates. Still today, they don’t want you breathing.

“Today, we can’t breathe,” said Eric’s mother five years later, her breath still strong. The system didn’t fail her—oh no no, it did not fail. It worked as intended and designed. Clockwork.

Exhale… fully exhale.

Now take another breath, deep deep breath. And hold.

You’ve been holding your breath for six years now. You know to watch for those chokeholds. But it’s not a muscular arm, this time. It’s a knee, and it, too, wears a badge. A sharp, bony, virulently violent knee, with half the weight of a high school dropout with 18 complaints on his record. Ninety-one and a half pounds of hate drilling your face into the ground. Your hands, helpless, handcuffed, your knuckles scraping the ground to crack open a little space to breathe.

Nine minutes, just to make sure you take your last. For there isn’t enough oxygen on this Earth for people like you.

Exhale, exhale, and release your soul to heaven where they can’t follow you.

Exhale… and take a deep breath, deeper still than before, for you are diving deeper now, deep within your body where a new life grows.

Bathroom floor covered in blood. You had gone to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and your body discharged the fetus it could no longer carry. You screamed in panic. Horror. Chaos. Call 911.

They wouldn’t see you before, when your body moaned in pain. They wouldn’t tell you you might miscarry. They sent you home, scared but spineless… because they might be charged with aiding and abetting a woman’s right to her own body.

Your baby couldn’t breathe, and neither could you. She is in heaven now, breathing much easier. But you, no. They charged you, they arrested you, and wanted you to do time. Twenty years to life. Because your body had the gall to do a fetus wrong. You have no right to grieve.

Exhale, for mother and child.

Take another breath. Take a deep breath for your home.

Source: Homelessness News SD

You don’t need to wake up, because you haven’t slept. If you sleep, they might take your clothes. Your bike. Your food. Or rape you. Or worse. 170,000 of you just in California.

Your body can’t breathe. Asthma. Tuberculosis. Hepatitis B and C. Scabies. Impetigo. Gas gangrene. Diphtheria. And all those bugs that bring still more disease—lice, bacteria, parasites. Your mind can’t breathe—PTSD, anxiety, depression, addiction, fear, shame.

The system renders those without the means to pay for shelter, criminals. The same system turns those who manipulate, steal, and lie to build their billion-dollar techno-empires, into heroes.

Exhale.

Hmm, you’re coughing. You’re not wearing a mask. Are you sick?

Take a deep breath… oh, I see, you can’t. It’s ok. I’ll take one for you.

The young. The old. The athletic. The unfit. The rich. The unemployed. Parents. Teachers. Entrepreneurs. Cashiers. Bus drivers. Software engineers. All are game.

The virus doesn’t care who it knocks down, how wonderful of a person they are, how many hours they’ve spent helping their communities, how much they’ve made or how much they’ve donated, or whether they’re in prison. Its world is microscopic; its tentacles have suffocated an entire planet.

Beads of sweat pop up on your forehead. Invisible arms encircle your chest, compressing it against your will. Your neck muscles step up to take over for the diaphragm, exhausted from trying to expand lungs drowning in themselves. Like George Floyd’s knuckles against the pavement.

When you can’t breathe, you can’t function. Your world loses its axis.

Lie on your belly, your head to one side. Exhale.

Now try to take a breath, as deep as you can. Hold.

Someone must be grilling outside. But why is the light so eerily orange? It’s only 11am.

On the menu today: carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, acid gases, sulfur dioxide, metals, dioxins, volatile organic compounds,¹ nanoplastics and other fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Would you care for dessert?

Your throat burns, your breath short and labored. Your eyes red and peppery. The smoke has submerged your entire region in a stagnant pool of grayish white, smudging out the sun and the blue from the sky. Your children cough so much they can’t sleep.

It’s not supposed to happen this way. You live near the lungs of the planet. But the Amazon has cancer… 53,620 tumors of fire. Perhaps you live in California—here, too, the fires burn, twisting their flames into tortured caricatures of the trees they consume. Canada had her day last year, remember?

The very air you breathe is the one that can kill you.

Exhale, exhale now! Purge those chemicals from your body.

Your heart’s beating hard. Take it easy. Breathe. Long deep breath. And hold.

It doesn’t require an assault. It doesn’t need a reason. It just explodes in your body.

Your heart pounds the inside of your chest as if it were a kickboxer. Blood presses against your eardrums. Your vision turns into a train careening through a dark tunnel. You try to get up and run, but your legs are jelly and your body ripples on the Richter scale. Your breath breaks into shallow splinters of glass.

You feel like someone is holding you underwater and want you to drown.

Meanwhile, the outside world wonders what’s going on with you. You wish you knew. We live in a world that gives (some of) us excess comfort and convenience while bombarding us with stress and anxiety 24x7.

Take your time to exhale, until your body returns to normal. Exhale, and again. There. You’re okay now.

Let’s get some fresh air, maybe a lap around the track? Important to get your daily exercise.

Take a deep breath, stretch out nice and long, and… hold.

They think it’s the heat and humidity. You are in Virginia after all, and those summers are heavy. Or maybe allergies, with all those flowering trees and grasses. Then you pass out during training. Your doctor calls asthma, but Dad isn’t convinced. He knows asthma. More tests later, they tell you it’s EILO.

You say lol wut. Not the Beyoncé song, no. Exercise-Induced Laryngeal Obstruction. But they do also call it Vocal Cord Dysfunction. The top of the larynx closing when it should open. Singers training for marathons beware!

But don’t give up your love of running—or singing.

Ready for some vocal warmups?

Alright, let’s stretch out that tongue, loosen up the lips, open up the chest, deep breath in and… nice and LOUD:

Resonant frequency. Everything vibrates. The entire universe is one massive energetic place. Atoms run marathons, electrons prefer sprints, and quanta do HIIT sessions, in two places at once. Because, overachievers.

Air rushing through bands of muscle. It whispers, it giggles, it cajoles, it communicates, it calls and it cries, it screams, and above all… it sings. It calls to the top of the mountains, at 113.8 decibels. No sound equipment necessary.

If you want to impress your friends and shatter a wine glass with your operatic pipes, get to know the wine glass first. They all have their individual resonant frequencies.

What is your resonant frequency? It might make you laugh when you find out...

Let’s exhale now. An international panel on an important topic is about to begin. Breath in, and hold.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever laughed so hard you nearly passed out. Raise the other hand if you’ve laughed so hard your body flipped over to crying.

A panel of distinguished speakers at the United Nations headquarters in New York City… executives from children’s television programs from the US, Italy, Canada, and South Korea. One presentation has been droning on for 40 minutes… The other panelists are starting to slouch in their chairs. The Italian executive forgets where he is, and shoves his thumbs up his nose. He then digs in, nice and deep—for a good ten seconds. 

My companion and I look at each other. First, a smirk. Then, a suppressed giggle. The giggle builds, builds, till it explodes into a pyroclastic flow of laughter—laughter that wants to go full-throated but can’t, so it stays silent but barrels out at a hundred atmospheres of pressure. We can’t look at each other. We can barely breathe. Tears press through the corners of our eyes.

I will never forget the Italian executive’s name. I will also not share it here out of profound professional courtesy. But his name lives on forever in my family as a code word for the things that make you laugh more than a little.

Well now. We’re almost at the end of our breath. Let’s take a moment to reflect.

If you’ve fallen asleep, awaken. If your back has slouched, sit up again fresh and renewed. Take a slow, deep, relaxed breath. Let the Buddha speak to you.

Contemplate the body. Breathe in long, then breathe in short. Breathe out long, then breathe out short. Breathe through the whole body.

Contemplate the feeling. Breathe to experience joy. Breathe to experience pleasure. Breathe to experience the activity of the mind… and then to calm it.

Contemplate the mind. Breathe and experience your mind. Breathe to please your mind. Breathe to focus your mind, and then to release it.

Contemplate mental objects. Breathe and observe impermanence. Breathe and observe dispassion, then cessation, and finally… letting go. Full and complete release.

So it was said in the Ānāpānasati Sutta.

Take a deep, long, slow breath. Feel the air rush in through your nostrils, fill your lungs, expand your ribcage, and pour into your belly.

Close your eyes and hold.

Hold all of the people who cannot breathe, in your heart. Breathe for them. Breathe for them while you hold your own.

Now, exhale. Exhale so that they may breathe. But we’ve forgotten someone.

We’re not the only ones who need to breathe.

Entanglement. Can you see two whales, two sea turtles, two fish, two seabirds, at once? Like forests and trees, they’re there whether you’re observing them or not. They want to shift their position. They want to move, but they can’t. They’re ensnared in fishing gear. Nets and lines left behind, floating in the ocean, unalive, entangling the living. Plastic bags and greenhouse sheeting. All of our convenience and consumption, choking our seas.

Ironic… given where our oxygen comes from. Remember what we are made of.

We are not the only ones here.

We all need to breathe.

1. VOCs, as they’re affectionately called, are a fun group to hang with. They include benzene, cresols, diphenyl, hydrogen cyanide, naphthalene, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. They can cause difficulty breathing, headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and corneal damage. Source: Fu, Joshua. “Wildfire Smoke Is Laced with Toxic Chemicals,” Earth Island Journal. October 2, 2020. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/wildfire-smoke-laced-with-toxic-chemicals.