This is how I now breathe

Witnessing what has happened in my lifetime and the way of unfolding around me. I’m processing, integrating. What I know from my own historical contexts, what I have in felt experiences from the ancestors, from my Ori. Here is where I am.

I never knew that one day I would come to know
The intimacy of the categories of breaths
That I would carefully track the rise and fall of my chest
Measure the deep or the shallow
The presence
The absence

There are now days where I measure my footsteps in breaths

of insulating breaths
Of mother breaths
Daughter breaths
Sister breaths
Grandma breaths

Laborious ones,
wrathful ones
weary ones
Ones with a thousand cries of ennui…

Dissipating ones

There are now days where I measure my footsteps in breaths
Past ones, lamenting, entreating, exalting…
Indifferent

The fact that you affect my breath, have affected my breath, will affect my breath

Exchanges broken down into the smallest of smallest meta
It goes unnoticed, yes?
And yet, there it is.
You do, have and will.
Perhaps I move more intentionally now
I choose the quality of air I allow in
And out…
My left foot steps first, then my right
What lies beneath my foot
Above it
Between it

There are now days where I measure my footsteps in breaths

SMW 2018