Sunday, September 1, 2024
Breathe in. Fill your lungs. Breathe out. Release it all. Do you feel okay? Knowing all the weight on your shoulders subside, you begin to feel the lingering pressure accumulate above your head waiting for you to give in. Stay calm and move forward, that’s the only solution, but the mind can’t help but apply stress to the frontal lobe. The air is heavy. You can feel the weight returning as every thought dances its way back into your head causing the same chaos as before yet feeling ten times more intense.
Breathe in. Fill your lungs. Breathe out. Release it all. Do you feel better? Is the weight lifted again? If yes, you are blind to the real issues at hand. If not, you are feeling the effects of the “fresh” air we breathe in on a daily basis.
“We sat in silence, letting the green in the air heal what it could.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The Scent Keeper
The Story We Live and Breathe
Allow me to paint the picture: You open your eyes from sleeping the whole night through. Feeling well rested with not a nightmare or dream to be remembered, you draw back the curtains allowing the light to fill your room. Not a cloud seen in the sky from the window, birds are chirping and you are ready to conquer the day. Yet you open the door to leave the house and instantly reality sets in with that first inhale of the outside air.
The smell catches you before you even see the source. Piled high, as tall as the car it sits beside, black trash bags greet you. Beyond them, disgruntled drivers causing traffic and honking their horns at double parked vehicles idling. The suffocating smell of exhaust fills your lungs and you can’t help but cough out for relief. The only trees on the block are being replaced with concrete walls and street barriers. What once showed signs of coexisting is now a full takeover. As the tree-remover finishes his job, spraying weed-killer on the last sprout of green life between the sidewalk slabs.
What once seemed so calm and relaxing from the comfort of your home, now feels as if walking out the front door through a portal of the unknown. The sounds of those birds chirping grows lost to the street noise. How unbearable the heat from the sun feels. When the cloudless sky would have been nice in the shade from underneath some trees. We now live in a concrete jungle where only in dreams we remember how beautiful the world used to be.
The World We Created
Nature, the trees, the grass, and everything in between, was not a gift and certainly was not one meant to be returned or regifted. See nature thrived before we even existed. Like all living creatures, we arrived as a gift to nature to treasure and nurture it as we would our offspring. To breathe in a necessity and expel an offering in hopes to forever continue a living cycle.
Blue skies for birds to forever feel free from their ties to land. Long streams form into rivers that flow into oceans so the aquatic can live on knowing their home isn’t getting any smaller. The land covered in vegetation sprouting trees that have been alive longer than today’s oldest human beings… What a world we live in. What a world we call home, though only some of us seem to understand that relationship.
I’m referring to that same green land we plow down to pave roads and build cities. The same body of waters we pollute with our garbage and waste from the sewers. I’m referring to that same blue sky we gas with chemicals, smoke, poison, you name it it’s probably been disbursed into the air, our forest can only work so hard to filter out. A world we inhabit only to cause more harm than good. Instead of living off the land, we are killing it beneath our feet and for what? So the future generation can never experience the beauty of this world, before we ruin it. To only watch videos online of how it once was, calling a few years ago the history of our forefathers.
The Cycles We Breathe
My lungs fill with what is believed to be “fresh” air from a world of polluted waters, waste filled land, and dying men. The air is thought none the fresher when humanity knows no better than to turn a blind eye to reality. Why birth new life in a place like this? Why expect the new to fix the old’s problems when the air we breath holds the same urgency? None.
Breathe in. Fill your lungs. Breathe out. Release it all. I don’t feel any better. The reality of this world has taken my comfort away from a future I was once so excited to step into. Now I can only hone in and find ways to enjoy today knowing tomorrow is falling apart.
Waking up in a world so upside down and backwards, how is anyone supposed to move forward. The new generation wants to live a life oblivious to the madness and the older generation wants to enjoy the time they have left, grateful it’s almost over. Leaving behind more than a handful of bad karma and worse means of humanity this world has seen.
Yet I’m thought to believe the air I breathe is fresh. Recycled through and through, repeating the same history over and over. This world spins on its axis of repeating cycles to no end since its inhabitants live with closed eyes and shut ears. Blind and deaf to the real issues at hand, we are this world’s parasites, depleting it of all life-providing abilities. We have nothing better to do than destroy and experiment, in order to understand further the mysteries that are mysteries for a reason.
Thank You!
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you so much for reading through this post. It’s an interesting one to say the least but nonetheless I’m definitely proud of how it turned out. I hope you enjoyed it too. Have a beautiful rest of your day and until the next one.
I enjoyed it. It’s so conscious and deep. Thank you for sharing. Blessings to you Beautiful Soul.