The exponent of breath
All we share
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
-Rachel Carson
Last week, a new island was born. It surged from the seafloor and gurgled itself above the water level in the region of Japan. In Italy, less than fifty miles from Vesuvius, the earth has been shaking and stretching around a super volcano that has been dormant for centuries. In Iceland, similar increases in seismic activity, with over 1,200 earthquakes in 24 hours, suggest an impending volcanic eruption is possible.
It seems the earth is agitated, groaning, grumbling, shifting in displeasure and dissatisfaction.
Can it see us?
My husband asks me if I think science will ever be able to tell us what this whole thing is. Will humans, in how ever many millennia to come, ever discover an answer to this mystery, and find a singular explanation for this infinite cosmic complexity? Do I think we will ever come to understand, on the most minute level to the highest, why all of this is, why there is something instead of nothing? Will we ever truly know?
I lie in bed, looking up through the hatch at the night sky. The trade winds rush in, hitting my face and shoulders — air that’s been wrapping itself around the earth for millions of years, brushing against skin and carrying wings and stirring up oceans and whispering through forests, air that has been rushing along shorelines and soaring above ancient bedrock and billowing curtains and ascending mountaintops, air that has sustained and transported countless beings, air that has dried tears and carried song, air perfumed by soil and ocean and sunlight, air that originated from the western shores of Africa and has journeyed across the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and the entire Caribbean Sea, and has found its way in my window, into my home, onto my face, into my lungs.
“Do you think we’ll ever know?”
I think for a while, and answer no. I don’t think we will ever know. It brings a smile to my face to imagine the mystery will endure, because it is everything, and it brings a tightness to my throat to think that our patterns might endure, and that we stand to learn nothing.
Will we always see ourselves as separate? Will we continue to needlessly cause suffering and pain to ourselves and others? Will we ever actually live in a manner that honors the miracle that all of this is, that each of us are?
The land behind me, in the territory of the Guna Yala people, holds something quite rare: sprawling, untouched sections of rainforest that still to this day haven’t seen a human. Adorned in a crown of clouds, the mountains watch quietly over the ocean, over us. I wonder if they can forgive us for everything that we don’t yet know, and everything that we have opted to forget.
I exhale a prayer for us all back out into the wind, and the air is quickly swept from my home, to the ocean, through the wild jungles behind me, then somewhere else, then everywhere else, as it continues its infinite drift on this lost and luminous “pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam”, gifting us all with the same, shared breath of life.
Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.
-Emily Dickenson
xo, Taylor
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