In Between, We Breathe

Chamberi neighborhood rooftop, Madrid, 2014.

Breathing in and breathing out. So simple really. We learn to breathe at birth and we stop breathing when we die. In and out. In and out.

So fundamental that we don’t think about our breath until we can’t catch our breath.

This simple, unexpected lesson was the one I took away from my first Camino, though all I thought I wanted to do was make it to Santiago on foot. I learned how to breathe. I learned I couldn’t help others breathe, including my children, without first breathing myself.

When I moved to Spain after a long walk across a hot country, no one, least of all myself, named what I was doing as putting on my own oxygen mask first. But that’s what I was doing, breathing. Not deeply, not shallowly. Evenly. In and out. In and out. Practicing.

I had to dig deep to remember that Camino lesson as I toiled away this past year beneath the attic ceiling in my second-floor garret, writing, working, building, hoping, waiting. Breathing. Breathing when so many could not, when lost breath was in the news daily. Poised with bated breath over my phone waiting for responses to carefully scripted messages designed to entice or please or promote, usually toward the goal of connection with children finding their own breath.

The difference between now and then is 8 years, a slow road, and 68 million breaths, the average breaths a human-being takes in 8 years. In and out.

Intuitively, because I had no understanding then of my breath, I didn’t want to become a pulmonologist’s emergency. Breath was ragged, choked, hasty, wet, searing, smoke-filled, ominous, short. So rare for oxygen to find the far parts of my body then, that when it did, my fingers tingled with the strain.

I’ve had to dig deep to remember why I had to learn to breathe when breath is so simple, or could be. Breath wasn’t even simple on a slow road with a grieving 15-year-old boy. Breath is life and I wanted to learn to breathe again, take a breath, find my breath, lengthen my breath. Live.

Life begins and ends with breath. The in-between is how we live, how we breathe, how we parent, how we make mistakes, how we make amends, how we grieve our losses.

Walking prayer, walking breath, walking life. To keep walking is to keep living. If I couldn’t walk, would I crawl? If I couldn’t crawl, would I still breathe?

In and out.