Breathing

I just stepped out onto my porch to check the rain gauge, but it was still raining and I didn't really want to get wet. My next door neighbor was walking by (he wears a FitBit and likes to get 10,000 steps recorded every day so he is often walking by) so I asked him to check the gauge for me.  One inch.  That's enough to keep us off the fields for another day. I don't have to put my shoes on yet.

But he asked me a question -- why is today the day that all the earthworms come up to die?

That's an easy one. They aren't coming up to die, they are coming up for air. The ground is saturated and it's hard to move down there and if you are an earthworm, it seems easier to go fast and breathe if you are on the surface.  Unfortunately, the surface is largely paved and you can drown or get run over or get disoriented and cooked and crispy when the sun comes out.  They do that all the time on the plastic that we grow crops in. There are always drowned earthworms in the small puddles that collect when the plastic stretches in a rain.

Every time I see earthworms scattered all over the road I remember the very old comic of Snoopy (on four feet, that's how old this is) walking about two feet above the ground, looking very perturbed and the last panel just has him saying, with disgust: "earthworms!"

This topic of needing air has been much on my mind lately. 

Obviously, we generally forget that we are breathing.  It happens automatically, around the clock.  But when we have trouble breathing, we notice every breath. When I was little, like about 5, I had asthma.  So did my mother (and so do lots of people in our family -- we know my great grandfather who came from China couldn't work in the cane fields because of his asthma...but he was a smart young man and he was reassigned as an indoor worker and thus he learned skills which allowed him to become a businessman and have 12 kids who all went to college.  Asthma: the enabler of our intellectual prowess on the Au Hoy side.).

Not being able to breathe is just about the worst malady.  Well, having a heart that malfunctions is probably worse, but along the same lines.  When you can't breathe, then the misery is constant.  You HAVE to breathe.  So all you want is just one deep breath and you can't have one.  I remember my mother having days and days of no breath, not being able to come outside, struggling to get air. It is so scary to see your mom like that. Even my father worried.

Of course there is better medicine now than there was then, and I have isolated my own allergy so I don't think I actually have asthma, I am allergic to dust/dust mites. I can generally predict when I will have an episode. My mother also manages her condition better now, but all of us worry about her lungs.  She can't breathe as well as we can, even on her best days.

We think about breathing, constantly, in yoga.  We are told that if we can't breathe normally through our noses, with mouth closed, that we are pushing too hard and we should back off until we can breathe easily.  This is a life saver.  Without that simple way of measuring, it would be natural to try to do things that I am just not able to do.  My belly is actually in the way most of the time (a different topic altogether) so I am limited by my physical size as well as my own lack of conditioning. But I have come a very long way in my yoga, even with this body of mine, and it is all about the breath.

We talk about breathing when we are at the synagogue (both in choir and in services).  And that is where we make the connection about the absolute miracle of breathing.  How often do we consider how amazing it is that we subsist on air? That our entire existence depends on inhaling and exhaling.  We try to imagine the connection between breathing and our souls, and I don't really get that, but I totally get the miracle of breath.

And finally, singing is just breathing in a different form.  And all humans understand about singing.  It is a part of what makes us human. 

Anyway, every day that we breathe without thinking about it is a blessing, and we should remember to notice that we are blessed.  And we should be really glad that we are not earthworms.