Breathing is love.

The order is important.

Why?

Because it is by breathing that anything that can be felt or expressed or identified as love comes into being. I could say, “Love is always there,” but the vagueness of meaning of the word “love” provides no access to the experience of love nor the capability of loving.

So I write, “Breathing is love.”

You know how to breathe. Breathing is ever-present. It is always with you. Thus, your access to love is always with you. It is the one thing that occurs every moment that can be experienced and controlled. Everything about breathing is mystical.

Love, on the other hand, carries so many connotations for mystical, inexplicable experience. But that’s because love is a concept separated from its necessary core: Breath.

Everything important in human life starts with breathing. Yes, of course there is the circulation of blood, the nervous system, but of all of the moment-to-moment essential life-giving and life-sustaining functions, breathing is the only one with which we can, consciously, participate with will.

It’s a strange thing to breathe consciously. It’s not so much that it doesn’t involve the senses, for the experience of breathing involves touch, taste, and smell—if one focuses attention delicately.

It can be difficult to isolate where in the body breathing begins. But that is because breathing doesn’t begin or end. It’s always occurring. I am breathing even when I “hold my breath.” Granted, I have interrupted the airflow, the in and out process, but the lungs continue to work even as I prevent exhalation and inhalation.

Exhalation and inhalation are the acts of breathing that can be consciously controlled. In that sense, what we call breathing are those acts. And in that case, we can stop our own breath. But for only a short time and it is in those times that we can be reminded of breathing’s centrality in every moment. But what is most often expressed in terms of basic survival needs is water, food, sleep, and protection from the elements (clothing and shelter in particular).

Yet, we can survive for days without water, weeks without food, even longer without sleep, and, except in the cases of extreme heat or cold, even longer without clothing or shelter. In the case of breathing, however, we can only last a few minutes.

Viewing needs as time-based changes the perception of their importance. For whatever reason, time is rarely factored into the importance of the provision of needs. Part of the ignorance related to the importance of breathing is that access to it is ever-present for many. But when inhalation and exhalation no longer occur effortlessly, when breathing requires more attentiveness, effort, and patience, then it’s impossible to be ignorant of its importance.

Anyone with severe asthma or emphysema can tell you how difficult it is to live with what I call a “breathing-impairment condition.” If you’re drowning, you notice how important breathing is. If you’re being waterboarded, you learn how important breathing is (one of the reasons it most certainly is a form of torture and perhaps one of the worst forms in terms of immediate and long-lasting trauma).

If you live in a factory city in China, a metropolitan city in the U.S., on a sweltering 100-degree and humid day, next to a hog confinement facility, near an agricultural site where pesticides and herbicides are sprayed, or any place where the air quality is poor due to pollution, climate, weather, topography, or vegetation, then you become aware of how difficult it is to breath.

However, for those who have only ever experienced living in such conditions—industrial and agricultural pollution, for example—it may not be known that breathing conditions are better elsewhere. Even if they know this intellectually without having experienced breathing in an environment with wonderful air quality they don’t really understand how comparatively extraordinary life can be with unpolluted and well-oxygenated air.

Where is the best air? Forests and coasts. This, more than any other reason, is why the Pacific Northwest is the best place I have lived in terms of air quality. Of course, anywhere in the Rocky Mountains (further north and away from populations are better) as long as there aren’t any forest fires.

But that’s why the coasts of Oregon and Washington are so attractive: Ocean to the west and forest to the east.

And rain.

I love deserts in many ways, and they have the potential to offer the air quality that the Northwest can. Because I value breathing to the degree that I do, it’s easy for me to choose the forests and coasts of the Northwestern United States (and British Columbia) over the southwestern deserts and smoggy coasts.

And rain, rain is beautiful, so disturbingly underrated and strangely resented by so many. Rain is crucial for clean air.

And trees! Oh, THE reason to eschew the desert. The two things we should be most concerned about preserving, as a species, are the forests and the water quality of oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, and groundwater. As bad as industrial pollution is, agricultural pollution is even worse because it pollutes both air and water, the two things most essential for the best breathing conditions.

I have wondered why environmentalists focus so ridiculously on forests and oceans as if they are entities in and of themselves. If the environmentalist centered his or her political philosophy on breathing then all else would fall into place in a way every human being could appreciate. Who gives a shit about forests or oceans if no one can explain why they are so critical to the quality of life around the world, even in areas that are not forested or near the coasts?

But, that’s their ignorance on display. The best environmentalists are humanists (of some sort). In other words, only a species-centric approach (the HUMAN species) can result in an environmentally-friendly world. Start at what’s most important for the sustainability of quality life and then build from there.

As I wrote at the beginning, breathing is love. Everything I have written is evidence of that. Notice the tone is not touchy-feely or gooey or romantic. It is simple, practical, basic. None of what I have written is inaccessible to anyone. In fact, my guess is that most people reading this will find that I am reporting nothing that they haven’t already heard in some form or another.

Perhaps, though, I am providing information and insights in a manner that ties together concepts that were formerly considered to be disparate. Of course, that is how narratives are created. It’s been well-documented that narratives are central to human beliefs and values.

What we experience in societies are the narratives that have created the physical world around us: buildings, streets, highways, trains, airports, canals, industrial farm fields, poultry confinement facilities, mines, shipping docks, offshore oil platforms, and so on. What existed before those narratives became the physical spaces around us were forests, plains, rivers, lakes, hills, mountains, and other naturally occurring topographical and oceanic features.

Narratives in and of themselves are not bad. But what has been created because of the narratives that have thus far been adopted through history, narratives such as private property, ownership, parliaments, liberty, freedom, justice, etc., can be measured through not only those physical structures I mentioned, but also air pollution, water pollution, and deforestation as well as poverty, crime, loneliness, despair, health care inaccessibility, and so on.

Rather than try to fix the problems that have been caused under the old narratives by insanely using the old narratives again and again, it seems wise to create new narratives based on less insanely abstract notions such as freedom, justice, and ownership. Those things may come into existence under a new narrative, but they cannot be the foundations themselves. They are dislocated from the core realities that might support them.

Breathing is not the beginning or the end; it is the constant that runs between the beginning and the end. Everything I have written in my Amsterdam writings is related to these thoughts, these ideas, these insights, these principles. The critical components of discovery are there: Breathing, sensation, eating, drinking, sleeping, motion, movement, stretching, walking, cycling, sex and sexuality.

It’s about the body, the discovery of the body, the movement of awareness away from abstract concepts to the basics of the body. That is what enabled me to shed the imposed narratives that had become the basis of my identity, beliefs, and values, and construct new narratives of what was important in life.

In fact, the very idea of “life” had to be shed in order that I could live. It was living that enabled the discoveries that gave rise to new narratives over time. Through the body, I was also able to engage in conversation, develop friendships, and sexual relationships with an appreciation for the bodies of those I encountered. I don’t mean appreciation in the possessive sense of “Your existence is for my appreciation of what you look like, feel like, smell like,” etc. No, I mean appreciation in the sense of caring, kindness, togetherness, gezelligheid.

I discovered what “we” meant. “We” had only ever been a concept to me. I couldn’t experience “we” because there were too many narratives of abstraction getting in the way of being present with others, listening attentively, observing silently, engaging through the eyes and through touch, sharing through laughter. What resulted was joy, sometimes quiet, sometimes euphoric, but joy experienced as “we.”

Language is a very strange thing. Words become easily disconnected from actuality, not removed once or twice from the experience of time and space in a body, but removed so entirely that the body in time and space becomes all but lost, a thing that exists in some way that is utterly detached from thought itself.

One word that has been used to describe such a phenomenon is “schism.” But that word creates more confusion because it’s too abstract. It doesn’t adequately describe the experience of what is called schism. That’s true of many words. All words.
It’s not that words should be abandoned entirely. I’m not suggesting that. What I am suggesting is that they are secondary in the experience of “we.” The way you smell, the facial expressions you make, the gestures you make, postures you adopt, the tone of your voice, inflection and volume, the way the skin of your forearm feels when I grasp it while laughing, the way your lips taste when I kiss you, the way your eyes sparkle when you’re telling me about the new “love of your life,” all of these things and innumerably more say so much more than the words spoken.

When I stopped focusing on simply what was said, I was able to experience being with others in a way that created “we.” Not with everyone nor all the time. In fact, I noticed that few were either willing or able to engage as “we” with me.

In my experience, Amsterdam is the best place in the world