A friend sent me this article about how birds breathe. She wrote, "breathing for birds is continuous flow, not there-and-back. What must a smooth life feel like?"
It is such a good question. That in and out, take and give, to and fro, come and go, is so key to how we are... maybe the duality of existence is intrinsic to us because of how we breathe. A bird could not focus on their breath to meditate! Nor a fish, I suppose.
Mind you, I was thinking about breathing for a different reason: and this maybe takes us away from the binary. It's the AND: Between in and out, there is an encounter, a moment of change.
The and rather than the or.
Some meditations suggest you focus on that tiny moment in between. Some breathing exercises suggest you hold at this point, both between in and out and between out and in. I have always liked that. To focus on the in between, To extend the space that is neither this nor that. To attend to the join or the absence or the boundary.
And here is an opportunity to do just that.
What a lovely meditation. Thank you.