By Sawyer Wood
Breathe out. Breathe in.
When a child emerges from the womb, it needs to breathe to clear its lungs. Not normal breaths, though. They need forced, ragged lungfuls of air—we call it crying.
I heard a story once of a child who wouldn’t cry when she was born, and the doctors began to fear her lungs wouldn’t be clean, that mucus or fluid or a mixture would sit where air should be. Her parents tried to make her cry; tried pinching, tried shouting, tried bumping their bulking fingers against her toes, all to get her to breathe in the way they wanted. But she just stared at them, her eyes blinking in the bleached hospital lights. She might get sick, the doctors worried, if she didn’t let something out. Finally, when they left her by herself in a room, warm tears bubbled out of her eyes, and she began to sob, whimpering infant breaths that gurgled in their newly acquired throat.
In Hebrew, the word for breath and spirit are the same—ruach.
What an evocative metaphor. Is our spirit, our soul, then, leaving the body each time we breathe? Each time a child cries for the first time, does their spirit creep its tiny formless head out, part curious, part terrified, of the wailing stranger it’s been bound to?
When did we learn to breathe?
Most of us are not taught, not coaxed, as the child was. The knowledge comes, seemingly innately, with the soul’s arrival; most children cry before they’re in their mother’s arms. Breaths take many forms—swift intakes in shock; long, drawn-out releases as lives fall apart; slurping, smudging breaths as children try to suck the last of the ketchup from their dinner plates.
We think of breath and voice as separate, but really, they’re almost synonymous.
Two flaps of skin—folds—in our throats shape all the sound we make. We call them vocal cords, but there’s nothing cord-like about them. Just two flaps, wet and raw and uncalloused for a newborn, weathered for the aged, slapping against each other as the breath comes in and out. They open and close in rapid succession, like a clapping captive audience to the spirit’s arrival and departure, and that’s what gives a voice its distinctive features. There’s some slight embellishment from the mouth shape and tongue placement, but breath is the substance of voice. It’s that substance that can be distinguished from across a room or through the crackling of a fifty-mile phone call. Even when it spans a continent, we recognize the sound of the spirit rushing over those folds, the familiar rhythm of the vibrations. Maybe that’s why Hebrew links the two—the spirit and the breath—because hearing a person’s voice is really hearing the residue of their soul, the crushed groaning as it presses against the kneading of those folds, trying to stay in one piece.
When I was a child, I fell into a swimming pool. The deep end had looked so close I thought I could touch it. I hadn’t learned to swim or even hold my breath; I floundered helplessly in the water. My mother said that when she came to pull me out, I was staring up as I sunk deeper, fearful eyes wide despite the stinging chlorine. I reached desperately for the edge or for the water’s surface. I imagine my spirit gasping in that pool too, its normally rhythmic in-and-out abruptly cut short. Its voice, its cry, wouldn’t be heard through the deadening vastness of the pool’s expanse. Was it terrified that it wouldn’t escape this barely budding five-year-old’s body, that its last sensation would be the churn of chlorine-pumped pool water rushing inside the lungs, its oblivion?
I wonder what the spirit feels like as we grow older. Does the body become less confining as it lengthens, belatedly, into adolescence? Or are its limits set, grudgingly, by the host’s creative capacity? When it lingers in that instant between exhale and intake, do its amorphous feet shuffle in anxious excitement, looking furtively around the room or the park or the darkened street corner? Is it waiting for a moment of release, forgetful of how infrequent they are? Does it pause for the split second it takes to feel disappointment, and realize that this is not a breath followed by anything but a whimpering retreat back into bloated lungs and the man-made shelter that surrounds them?
When we hold our breath, is the pressure that builds from a lack of oxygen, or from the pounding of that spirit to escape, because it can’t stand the cramped confines of our ribcage prisons? Is the burning sensation really a biological response, or the spirit’s soreness from fitting inside our awkward bodies, with deformed grubby forks for limbs, bones bulging in haphazard structures, and muscles that wrap and writhe like seething deformed fishes?
What could the body be, then, but a prison?
I think of those thrashing moments in the swimming pool. My stinging eyes, fingertips grasping madly to crest the ripples that dance across the surface. The spirit inside me pounds on its youthful prison bars, my lungs aching for relief as it throws itself against the walls. But, in a daze, I am dragged out of the water and the breath explodes into a spray of coughs.
What did the five-year-old feel as he broke the surface? I wonder if he could see, through bleary, burning eyes, that spirit rush out of him. I wonder if he could feel the release of the insatiable pressure, hear the croaking wheezes and the immensity of such desperate calmness, of breath renewed to the air and the lungs. I wonder if he could see the spirit sputter and grasp for knees it didn’t have and hack out sighs of relief—relief that sounded like forced, ragged lungfuls of laughter.
I wish I felt that relief, that laughter, more often.
With each year of life, shouldn’t the spirit’s living space expand, even marginally, spreading so another piece of its cramped and crumpled infinity can flatten out inside the finite being? Shouldn’t it have the right to count each tiny insignificant millimeter as a victory, to savor them, like they, too, are infinities?
Sometimes I think my spirit wasn’t pulled out with the body, that there was no coughing or laughing. That it’s still sinking, with silent widening eyes, into the depths of that swimming pool. Sometimes I think my spirit is like the child that surfaced from her mother’s womb without knowing how to cry; maybe it never learned how to breathe.
But another memory surfaces. I am a young man; my hands are resting heavily on the keys of a piano. I pluck out a melody, not one I’ve heard before, yet it’s familiar. There’s a lightness to it. My fingers feel burdened and somehow, simultaneously, weightless. It’s much like breathing, something I swear weighs nothing, yet I can feel it escaping me.
My spirit catches on the apex of the exhale—the melody holds long enough for it to rest on the piano’s bench, its fingers pressed lightly into the keys with mine. There’s something here, an idle life-filled longing, and I swear I feel the spirit take a breath of its own.
Sawyer Wood is an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University studying Creative Writing, Portuguese Studies, and Linguistics. He loves reading, writing, singing, and storytelling in any form.
Header image by Jenedy Paige, Inscape Fall 2023
