To Shed A Breath
I sat down at her desk. With a deep sigh, I dropped my shoulders, and shed a breath. I inhaled with the expanse of a thousand ancestors that made my existence in this moment possible. Closing my eyes, I remembered…
….The sultry breeze of this tropical oasis sailed through my mind until catching a convection to the Himalayas. Again, I inhaled, this time the thin, crisp air enlivened my lungs. It filled me with the energy to keep going, taught me how to be light. Exhaling, I shed my weight, my worries, my woes. I continued the climb. And traveled with wonder as that high altitude trail unraveled with time to this sea-level sanctuary.
Alone in a beachside bungalow, on an atoll as remote as a star in the void of the sky, I breathe in the silence. The solitude. The space to expand into myself. The blank canvas of this page is a welcomed outlet, a form to fill with the unprocessed experiences that prompted this retreat, as well as the musings that lured me here to retrieve. I’m ravenous for their message and, more so, their meaning.
I feel the words flowing through my fingertips, making sense out of the energies that pulse through my body. I recognize that there’s no coincidence. I see the synchronicities and the scenes as they’re played out like screenplays on a sacred scroll.
I see how her efforts have paved the way for me to arrive here. I recognize her, or rather, I recognize the qualities in her: the focus it requires to hold space, to show face, to emanate grace. She’s sensitive like me. She feels everything like me. She accepts her past and allows her future and embraces the presence. And, after inviting spirit to manifest through her, after experiencing the voltage of a force beyond herself flow into this dimension, I understand the need to retreat. To breathe. To shed, with each breath, any fragments of the energetic impact. And to replenish with each purifying inhalation.
This woman, this Emma, is an eternal emanation. She’s a mother, a daughter, a sister. She’s a sailor, a healer, a creator. She’s a creation of elemental genius. She’s a gem. And the sweetest thing about her is that she genuinely has no idea how special she is.
Her humble abode and simple means might conceal her magnificence. But one step inside, one glance at eternity within her eyes, one wholesome embrace from her reverent wings, and her true identity begins to glimmer through the modest veil she’s learned to don. For, once revealed, her light is unstoppable. It illuminates the choices, the steps, the paths— the journey that folds in on itself like a labyrinth. And, resting at the center, waiting for your arrival, are the pearls of wisdom you’ve come here to recollect.
In her presence, within the precious moments of immortality that she materializes, I graced the inevitable realizations from which there’s no turning back. But she knew, I knew, we knew that I needed to acclimate to their amplitude with space to breathe it in. I needed to be alone. To discover on my own. To receive. To integrate. To incarnate. To revel in respiring. To merge with the moment that seemed destined like a prayer whispered a billion breaths ago by my ancestors a million steps ago that began sparkling upon the horizon of a holy pilgrimage many years ago.
This moment. At her desk. With all her belongings surrounding me that remind me of myself. Within a space she’s created that evokes an eternal sense of self. And while she’s nowhere to be seen, I feel her all around me. I recognize her within me. And therein lies her gift, the gift of breath— a recognition of self that penetrates presence beyond past, beyond future, into an experience that explains it all.
