OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Suspiration

April 7th, 2008

While on the death musings, may I share with you my fantasy of the first thing to happen upon my demise?

I want to be handed a greatest hits album of the breaths I have taken in my life. The contented sighs, the breaths taken to help push each of my sons out into the world, the big, clear breaths that follow a good cry. The yoga breaths tat fill the empty spaces, pulling shoulders down and back. A long, savoring inhale of the air after a rain when you strain to catch the delicacies of the smell of living earth, tender green-ness and you suspect that blade of grass there has just breathed in your carbon dioxide, gratefully, and repaid you by exhaling some oxygen in your direction. The breaths taken in performing chamber music, synchronizing your music with another players as you inhale and come in together. I coach the boys to breathe before we start solving problems, and my sister teaches her ‘cello students how breathing is a mysteriously important part of making music. There’s an intimacy to breath — I hear the performer breathing in my headphones as I listen to a recording of the Bach Cello Suites and find myself breathing with, conspiring, and aspiring. But for all the intimacy of breath, these indestrucible oxygen atoms — who else’s lungs have they entered, what other blood streams have they coursed through? Am I breathing in Abraham Lincoln right now? And may I not long for assurances the planet will continue past all of its current travails, that many subsequent generations may know good air to breathe?

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