The simplicity of belonging
Sometimes I forget how simple it really is.
To belong. To be alive. To breathe.
When I slow down enough to notice, I remember that every inhale is borrowed.
That what I take in, someone else has released.
That what I exhale, the world will use again.
It’s strange and beautiful—this unseen communion we share.
Without knowing each other’s names, we participate in the same rhythm of giving and receiving.
Without signing a covenant, we are already bound.
The memory of small voices
I still laugh when I think back to when Lauren and I were first married.
Whenever I’d turn toward her in bed, she’d nudge me away, half-asleep, saying I was “sucking up all the oxygen.”
Not long after, when the kids were small and would fall asleep beside me, I’d hear the same thing—tiny voices in the dark telling me, “Turn around, Daddy, you’re taking all the air!”
Back then, I believed them.
I thought I was taking something away.
Only later did I understand that even in that breath, I was giving them what they needed—
the air they would draw in next,
the proof that life moves through us, not from us.
Even in sleep, even in silence, we were teaching each other how to share the same air,
the same world,
the same grace.
The widening communion
But it isn’t just the ones beside us.
Every breath we take is woven into the lungs of the world—
the trees, the tides, the wind that carries dust across oceans,
the unseen life exhaling in rhythm with our own.
We’re breathing with everything that has ever lived,
and everything still learning how to.
The oldest prayer
No creed, no ritual, no doctrine has ever been as constant as breath.
It is the first act we perform at birth, the last we surrender at death.
And in between, it is the only unbroken prayer we ever truly pray.
Each breath is grace passing through us—
a reminder that what sustains us is not ours to own,
only ours to honor,
and to return.
So when I breathe now, I try to remember:
I am not alone.
I am in communion.
And the air itself is love made visible,
moving endlessly between us.
A Remembrance of Breath
The first language of life
Long before words,
we spoke in breath.
The ancients called it ruach, pneuma, prana—
the living wind that animates all things.
Your inhale was once another’s exhale,
a quiet covenant passed through time.
Every life before us has lived in this rhythm—
the shared pulse between giving and receiving.
We breathe each other’s memory.
We become the grace of all being.
A Breath Between Us
If you’re reading this now, pause.
Inhale gently.
Know that what fills your lungs once moved through mine,
and through countless others before us.
Exhale slowly.
Someone, somewhere, will breathe what you’ve just given.
We are never as separate as we think.
Even in the space between us,
grace is already moving.