38. Breathe

... being a few thoughts on the air that we breathe, where it might have come from, where it might go, and what we do with it.

We are told that good things happen when we concentrate on our breathing. It helps us to calm down when we are anxious, when we are angry, when we are overwhelmed. When we are naturally calm and relaxed, and when we are asleep, our breathing becomes deeper, and more regular. Our thoughts settle, and problems seem to resolve themselves in the background, in our subconscious minds, whist we are not looking.

Sometimes when I am not calm, when I am frustrated, angry or anxious, I forget to think about my breathing. I might shout, or stamp about, pace the room, swear, or try and resolve the problem too quickly and clumsily, making everything worse. I have even been known, under extreme duress to bang my head against the table or bite the back of my hand. None of it really does any good. Not for more than a few seconds anyway. At risk of sounding like a new age spiritual healer, concentrating on one’s breathing can bring a more lasting respite from difficult emotions.

The spirituality of breathing is plain to see when you think about it. It is breath that sustains us, and all the living creatures on the surface of the Earth¹, and somehow, (if I remember my school biology lessons correctly) all the plants exist in some sort symbiosis with us, purifying our spent breath and creating the fresh air that we need to keep on breathing. The hippies were right- we need trees to survive! Thinking about that gives me quite a profound buzz. I can see my place in a magnificent scheme of things. The music of J.S Bach affects me in a similar way, although it expresses the thought slightly differently, being created in the eighteenth in a society which strongly believed in an ordered universe with God surrounded by his angels at the centre of it.

Music is good for breathing, it creates rhythms in our minds, rhythms that affect our whole bodies. We cant help but tap our feet, nod our heads, or even dance. You can’t dance properly and hold on to stressful thoughts and anxieties. That is the beauty of music. All music from Vivaldi to the Velvet Underground, from Bach to the Backstreet Boys. Feel free to add your favourite wide range of taste in music phrase at this point.

Speaking of J.S. Bach, it is a mathematical certainty that every breath you take will contain a few molecules that he once breathed. Thats even after taking into account the circulation of air around the globe, the amount of breaths he would have taken in his lifetime, and the amount of molecules that he would have breathed, even taking into account that he would have breathed a fair proportion of those molecules multiple times.

This often quoted fact is examined extensively in brilliant science based book called “Caesar’s Last Breath” by Sam Kean. Kean is one of those writers who makes science seem immediately interesting and accessible. the poem below owes a great deal to that book. I read it shortly after my parents had died, leaving me orphaned at the tender age of fifty five. (You are always at a tender age when you become an orphan.) Recognising that that my Dad would have enjoyed it, and being unable to share it with him, brought a melancholy feeling. Focusing on my breath (which couldn’t be avoided as I read the book) helped with that.

If this poem was a piece of music, it would have a slightly melancholy feel to it. When I perform it, I like to read very slowly to get the full full effect. If I can breathe with it, and manage to somehow get the audience to join in with the breathing, all the better. Breathing focuses the mind.

I shall really have to read Caesar’s Last Breath again. It finishes with the image of the first spaceship to colonise another planet, taking with it a quantity of breathable air, which would become part of the atmosphere of the new world, introducing molecules of air once breathed by Caesar, (and J.S.Bach, and Lemmy out of Motörhead, my Dad, my Mother… and you… and me). That really tunes me in to my place in creation, in time and space and whatever other dimensions we might inhabit.

Take a breath, and have a read².

Breathe

Breathe in
Take your time
Nice and slowly
Savour the breath as it fills your lungs 
Trillions upon trillions of molecules of air
Sextillions
Actually

Breathe out
Carefully 
With measured breath
And out they flow
An unimaginably huge amount of tiny, tiny particles

You have harvested their oxygen
But they will be recharged and recycled
That's the way of things
You are returning your empties
to the dairy of Earth's atmosphere
where they will be filled with goodness again.
ready to be passed on to the lungs of others
over the expanse of years ahead
to future generations
of people just like you

Inhale.
Easy now
and consider what the mathematicians say,
backed up by the scientists 
and reported from time to time 
in magazines
and Internet articles.
"It is an irrefutable fact,"
they claim
“that some of those recycled molecules
that you take in with every breath
once passed through the lungs of... 
Jesus Christ
or Socrates
or Leonardo da Vinci
In fact all three
and more besides"

Those boffins
they always pick noble people
for examples
and so should you

but that doesn't necessarily exclude your mother.
Or mine.

Allow the wisdom of the ages to fill your chest
invigorate the blood in your heart
and circulate throughout your being

Exhale
Slow and long
And as you do
modify the flow of air that leaves your mouth,
using your vocal cords
using your lips and tongue:
You are playing music
composed with the breath of the great and the good
of our ancestors
of everything that ever lived 

enjoy the thrill of playing your instrument
Creating your own libretto

Go with the flow
Choose your words well
Take your inspiration
from your respiration

Breathe

1. I’m sure that fishes have some similar reciprocal agreement with seaweed and all the stuff that sprouts up at the bottom of oceans and rivers

2. The poem sprang from a prompt given at a workshop led by the excellent South Yorkshire musician and poet, Ray Hearne, who often inspires others to create interesting stuff. The prompt was given at the end of a session in order that participants could go away and work on a poem to be shared the following week.

I recall that it was the sort of prompt that suggests a short list of words to be included, but I cant remember what the words were, just that many of the other participants had chosen to include the word “cicada”, which I believe is the name for the insect family that includes grasshoppers and crickets. I had either missed that part of the prompt or chosen to ignore it and erased it from my memory. As cicadas (cicadae?) came up in poem after poem read by the rest of the group I felt slightly awkward.

I imagine that breath must have been one of the words in the prompt - but that is about all I can remember of it.

Sorry Ray.