Say it Hot (Reflections on Breath)

When I bend down to snuggle with Sophie, I like to breathe in the smell of her. As I bury my nose in her fur, I hear her breathing change. It is the same breathy sound that I expel when I first sink into a hot bathtub.

When I was in college I didn't date very much, but one summer I did have a boyfriend. After dinner out one night we sat on the couch. I remember smelling his cologne. It smelled wonderful. I breathed in so deeply and so repeatedly that he finally made a comment. Maybe you shouldn't do that. It might make you sick, he said.

Sometimes my breath warns me of things. When I started getting short of breath when I exercised, I went in for tests. My doctor discovered my cholesterol levels were sky high. She called me on my cell phone while I was a mile high in Denver. I was visiting friends, trying to catch my breath by getting away for the weekend.

My breath will tell me when I am in pain, when I have sinusitis, have acid reflux or even have a respiratory infection. Most of the time, my breath tells me I am stressed out. I imagine someday it will tell me when my breaths are coming to an end.

I like watching my husband breathe when he sleeps. His chest rises and falls. Sophie's little head goes along for the ride. When I snuggle with my husband, I sometimes notice our breathing and match my breath to his so that our breath rises and falls at the same time.

I read a while back that breathing very slowly can increase my ability to resist temptation. When I breathe in very slowly over a large chocolate chip muffin, it does not ease my temptation.

I recently had a VO2 test at my gym to measure my maximum rate of oxygen consumption. The good news is that I am in excellent cardiovascular physical fitness. Unfortunately, it didn't tell me that I am not overweight. I am. It does tell me that I need to work out harder. I must "up" my pace and breathe harder to get my heart rate faster for the exercise to really matter.

I used to get stitches when I would run. Stitches is that stabbing pain in your side. I read that exhaling as my right foot strikes the ground causes this. I alternate my exhale and the stitches went away. The exhale on my right foot causes my liver to press against my diaphragm which creates spasms. I now try to be kind to my liver since I need it for other things that I may not be as kind to it with.

When Sophie was a puppy she used to get the hiccups all the time. When I was younger, I used to get the hiccups all the time. Hiccups start in the diaphragm. I would stand on my head, press my temple with a spoon or have someone scare me. It never got rid of my hiccups. When I get them, I now know to close my mouth. I hold my breath and count to 10. It never works. I eat a teaspoon of dry sugar. I enjoy the sugar even if it doesn't work. It always works.

Counting breaths is often how I start my meditation every day. 1:2 breaths, which is where gradually I make the length of my breath out twice as long as the breath in, relaxes me no matter where I am.

I like to breath the hot moist air of the sauna at the gym. It relaxes me. I hate smelling the eucalyptus oil that others like. They believe it treats respiratory ills and calms them. It makes me gasp and cough. I can't relax.

I dislike smelling cough drops or bad breath that isn't from me. The worst is when I am in the sauna and can smell it even from the other side. Sometimes I sit alone with someone's lingering breath long after they have left.

When I visit my friends in Denver now, my cholesterol is under control. We drive up into the mountains where the elevation still knocks the breath out of me. Sometimes, the view of the mountains does the same.

I hear that letting wine breathe mellows the taste and helps the aroma to bloom. I don't understand. The taste mellows in my mouth and the aroma blooms in my nose. I am what breathes the fragrance of wine through my nose.

I enjoy reading Thoreau. He tells us: "Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each." Henry David Thoreau. My kind of poet.

I didn't like the guy in college so much when he told me not to breathe in his cologne. Once I realized I liked his cologne more than I liked him, we broke up. I breathed a lot easier after that.

I have nothing left to say, at least about breath. I will save my breath.

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say and say it hot." D. H. Lawrence

Scent of a Dog

I have been thinking about scents lately. It's not that I want to think about them. I just can't seem to escape them.

The other night on our walk, Sophie, our Catahoula Leopard dog, was charging out of the driveway with her nose to the ground like a bloodhound. Who knows what she was smelling. The whole walk she seemed to be in pursuit of something invisible that was long since gone. Each season seems to bring a whole assortment of exciting new scents that gets her tail wagging and nose twitching.

Tonight at the gym I started doing a new stretch to ward off the pain from Piriformis Syndrome that I sometimes get. This stretch requires that I lie down on the bench face down with one leg hanging off the side. As I got into this position, my nose came "face to face" with the very strong scent of men's hair product left behind by a man who had been there sometime before me. The scent was so strong it could even have been hours that he had since left the gym and the scent still wouldn't have time to dissipate.

Later in my stretches I did a couple yoga poses on a mat while a woman stood on a wobble board next to me for strength and balance. The scent of her lotion was so strong I actually did leave to go do something else.

So, while I am trying to not smell things, Sophie is just a happy little girl wagging her tail following whatever invisible trail she "sees" with her nose.

The scents that do bother me seem to be everywhere. Earlier in the week I considered how I might correctly complain about a woman at work who seems to think that perfume in the office can somehow be pleasant for anyone else in the office other than herself. (If you are at all conflicted, let me break it to you. It is not.)

In the evening, when Sophie has finally wound down and has curled up next to me on the couch, I like to nuzzle my nose into the thick fur around her neck. Mmmm. She has that summer dog sort of smell. It's not as bad as wet dog, but it is still a bit fragrant. Ever since she got too big to wash in our laundry tub downstairs, we take her to get a shampoo and have her nails trimmed every few weeks, which is quite honestly something I never thought I would do for a dog, like ever. I rarely get my own nails done. But really, I mostly don't mind her smell and hardly notice. It's just Sophie.

While the scent that people put on themselves to make themselves smell better seems to repel me, Sophie's natural scent is far more pleasant and even soothing somehow. I'm certainly not advocating that people go natural in the scent arena, but a little discretion and moderation would be welcome.

I thought that perhaps in protest I would start wearing Sophie scent somehow. But then I realized that when I came home little Sophie might bark at me, not knowing who I was. If I did this at work, people might also get the notion to pet me or worse just want to send me outside. And, since I like how her tail wags when I come home and she tries to sniff out my scent among all of the other foreign scents on me from the day, I guess that is, well, it's nothing to sniff at.

The Tempest

David and I recently watched a documentary called Shakespeare Behind Bars. The documentary follows a group of men in prison for heinous crimes as they rehearse for a production of The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play. As they rehearse, learn their lines and ultimately decode the personal meaning of their particular roles from the play against the backdrop of their own lives, it seems that the one theme that everything comes down to is meaning in life.

I wanted to believe that the Shakespeare program had changed these men's lives. As I watched, the program did seem at least to change me. But, in reading the follow up on-line, I learned that so many of the inmates continued to have problems with the law. Some were sent back for more years when their parole hearing arrived. Some were released only to be incarcerated yet again. Only a few were released and seemed to live a happy life. How much had the program changed any of their lives no one but the inmates themselves would ever know. And, perhaps whom among any of us can ever really say? After all, do we know the measure of change following anything in life?

One man made a deep impression on me. He had lived a sad childhood and actually seemed like a nice enough guy. Yet, it was this man who had strangled a woman who reminded him of someone who had caused him great pain in his childhood. When I was a teenager, my relationship with my step-mother was quite stormy. Little did I know then that the stormy waves she rode were part of what is called bipolar disorder today. And what does it even matter? We are still accountable for our own actions. It took me many years after moving away to college to realize that I didn't have to tie my little raft to hers. She would surely drown us both. The life I live with my husband today is miraculously joyous, calm and soothing. What accounts for drama is having to go back to the grocery store for another baguette because we finished the one we had for breakfast.

The irony of the Shakespeare prison program was in the meaning that the one inmate was so desperate to find in his own life. The Tempest explores the ideas of guilt and innocence and the fine line between them. It also explores the cyclical nature of injustice, or justice as the case may be. One good turn, so they say.

The one inmate expected to live out his life in prison. He had not come to any true life meaning by the end of the documentary, just as surely as many of us will not come to one at the end of our lives. Yet, to the audience it seemed clear that he should have. And perhaps if he never does, then he will truly continue to live the Tempest's life imprisoned on his own island.

The difference between happiness and tragedy in life is both personal and delicate. Sometimes those who have suffered great tragedy find the greatest happiness. Other times it is those who should be the happiest that continue to suffer the most. Shakespeare seemed to know this. The final scene in The Tempest has Prospero calling for the audience to end his spell by their applause. And in this way the meaning to life seems clear. It is but ourselves that set us free, for we are gods.