Breathing

Have you ever watched clouds? I find relaxation, especially when it’s warmer, from laying on my back looking up at the clouds. They are always in motion, always changing.

Quick science lesson. Clouds consist of tiny droplets of water attached to something, often particles of dust. As the wind blows, these droplets gather together forming various shapes.

The Kingdom of heaven is like a cloud…

You and I are particles of dust, and when the living water attaches to us, we become more than we were before. We have life and form, and as the wind of the Spirit moves through us and around us, we gather together and the Kingdom expands.

The creation account in Genisis says that I AM breathed the breath of life into the dust and life emerged. Maybe this is the essence of I AM. Breath. Wind.

We often think of God as three people. The Father, a guy with a white beard sitting on a throne. Jesus, the human form of the divine. The Holy Spirit, which we’re not not always sure how to define. Does this blind us to something much deeper and mysterious.

Could it be that these three “persons” of the Trinity are just clouds, tangible representations of something beyond our comprehension? Sometimes I worry that our need for certainty and nice tidy explanations limits our understanding of I AM.

Is breath the essence of I AM? I admit I am not a Hebrew scholar. I know very little Hebrew. But I heard something recently that got me thinking. Take a minute and try this… Take a few deep, deliberate breaths. When you breath in, say “Yah,” and when you breath out say “weh.” Yah-weh. Yah-weh. I’m not sure if this is the “right” pronouncation for YHWH, but I find it fascinating when the word is sounded out this way. It almost sounds like breathing.

This past Wednesday in my yoga class, our focus was on breathing. For over an hour, my attention was continually on my breath. As the evening went on, I was reminded of how important breathing is – without it we die – and how often we take it for granted.

How often do we take the movement of I AM for granted as well? I believe that we need to think less of I AM as static and definable and more as dynamic and beyond understanding. When we embrace mystery and contemplate the vastness of creation and Creator, our eyes can be opened to a new level of consiousness.

When I was younger, we often watched The Sound of Music. It was one of my mom’s favorite movies. There is a song in the movie that says, “How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” What if we approached I AM more like a cloud and less like something we can measure and define? Has our need to be right contributed to the violence, termoil, and pain in the world? Would our eyes be more open if we could allow ourselves to be engulfed in the cloud?

The next time you breath, take a look at the sky, watch the clouds for a few minutes, and open yourself to the movement of the breath that gives life to the world.