All breath, thoughtless or not, is borrowed.
We spend our speech on gossip, fears, mindless chatter.
We spend long words philosophizing,
Managing, shaping the meaning of all we know.
We spend our voice singing, yelling, cheering.
We worship. We mourn. We celebrate.
Through it all we breathe.
We sigh. We laugh. We cry. We fight.
We never measure the inexhaustible.
We can’t treasure a moment any more than
A wealthy old fool can treasure a dollar
With millions more in the bank.
The worth of a breath is never felt but when it’s labored.
We only see the edges when scarcity screams.
A crippled breath is a bargain with the future.
‍Take me, or die. Struggle through me, and live.
The next breath is everything,
Always everything –
The ticket to every looming hope,
A doorway to the future,
The bridge to everywhere.
It stands before every dream and desire.
It keeps you present with your people.
Breathing is unlisted,
Never on To Do lists or Bucket lists.
Rarely, maybe, is it written
On a list of thankfulness because
Don’t we intend to breathe forever?
How can this grand monolith we call life be a vapor?
How can this immortal motion
Be overtaken by stillness?
How can our time be escaping us a little
Every time we exhale?
How can we end, when eternity itself
Cries out from our hearts
That we will never die?
Birth, an entrance, an inhale,
The journey itself,
Then death, an exhale,
A breath cut in half.
An exit.
This simply cannot be all.
We don’t have to see to believe
That after the end of the end,
After the separation
As wide as the depths of the sky
We remain.
We live
Unblinking, unbreathing, fleshless.
Life will somehow persist
And we will live,
Spending incomprehensible currencies,
Waking again into the new,
All new.
Maybe the paradox echoes
Further than we know:
The last shall be first, and the first last,
When the last breath unearths a new beginning,
And the new beginning entombs an end.

[Photo Attribution: Jeff Gunn from Atlanta, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]