This short piece was originally written in July 1999.  It may give you a fresh sense of possibility for breathing meditation.

I look into the air and see right through it.  I move my body and feel invisible pressures, waftings of liquid presence, pressing round with no gaps or spaces.  Looking opens to knowing this mystery; in the room, in the door locks, between the carpet tufts, around my tongue, wrapping each object so intimately that no violence of movement can cause a total vacuum.

Playfully I isolate a cubic metre of space and begin to sift the invisible contents with sieves of in-place knowing.  Dust, moulds, tiny seeds, spores, bits of hair and flakes of skin; pollen grains of many species, globs of soot, perfume, diesel fuel exhaust, invisible microorganisms grazing the three dimensional field, tiny insects – themselves great birds of prey in this micro vastness; and all of these beings, complex weavings in themselves, are leaking chemicals and absorbing others.

There is a cacophony of chemical conversations, a silent deafening clinking of countless bottles, all carrying messages to land eventually on new and unexpecting shores.  “Goods for sale.”  “Accommodation wanted.”  “Flatmate looking for companion.” “Employment offered” and “employment wanted”; a vast metropolis floating in the matrix, trusting in the universe to further all their stories.

Around these fluid becomings are molecules of gas, translucent to photons streaming from the solar being’s great unfathomable heart.  Nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, ammonia, methane and so forth.  They are jiggling and flowing, vibrating to the dance of changing temperature, always on the move from here to there.

Linking into forms and disappearing from space.
Entering space and bursting free from opaque forms.
This cubic metre is a bouillabaisse,
an either soup,
a ferment of beingness, rich and flavourful
to tongues designed to taste these worlds.

Breathing in a sucking swirling of beings, logs, flotsam and jettison – the whole avian universe rolling round the nostril hairs, heating, transforming, descending into a new time and place of constant changing activity.  Gaseous universe plunging into the ocean.  My blood is filled with beings.  Conversations everywhere, orgies of potlaching, gifts given and received, a never ending party with guests coming and going.

How rarely we imagine the richness of activity that is needed for anything to be, even if that anything is called ‘being bored’ or ‘doing nothing’ or simply waiting for something interesting to occur!  Dip into this moment of nowness.  The one that’s all around you and right in front of your nose.  Open your mind and breathe.  You’ll see what I mean.