“As long as breath fills my lungs…”
How many times have I sang that?
I used to wonder at the eastern practice:
Sitting, breathing, sitting, breathing,
Focusing on the simple movement of air
as if nothing else mattered
And when you understood that, they said
you would understand everything else
So I sit:
One – I’m breathing in
and I know I’m breathing in
One – I’m breathing out
and I know I’m breathing out
Then Two, and Three –
if I make it that far
Because slowly,
a cat stalking my attention in the shadows
The cares of my world creep in
to Pounce
To carry away those weaker moments of concentration
that cannot fend for themselves
And leave me fretting for
sounds of footsteps on the woodwork
and whether the dog’s been fed
But from the scattered leavings of distraction
again I try,
and sit:
One – I’m breathing in
and I know I’m breathing in
And perhaps this time I’ll make it until Four,
in that non-grasping, non-seeking…
what was the phrase
that my teacher used
when we were sitting that day under…
Damn. (in a non-grasping, non-seeking sense,
of course.)
One – and I’m breathing in
again.
[This whole thing is a fragment from late last year, but I’ve only now decided that it’s done, and trimmed the dead end (below) off of it]
==================================================================
(Why is breathing, simple breath
so difficult?
It’s the first thing we do,
on our own, when the world
wrenches us from the womb
free of care
to fend for ourselves (sort of)
And the last thing we do
when the world draws us onward again
So is that it?
That we have never known life
without this precious focus
David Pablo Cohn 