Breath and Beginning

“Breath as compass, inheritance, and the first story we ever tell.”

The only element that matters is oxygen. Not the way it sits in chemistry tables, tidy and numbered, but the way it drags into your lungs on a cold day and reminds you you’re alive. Breath is the first covenant, the oldest story. Before words, before thought, before names or maps, there was only the drawing in and the letting go.

I have been thinking about maps. Not the kind folded into glove compartments or uploaded to glowing screens. The maps we carry inside are stranger, harder to chart. Some trace the shape of grief, some joy, some circle endlessly around longing. Mine is made of breath. Every inhale, every exhale has left a line, an impression, a trail. If you laid it down on paper, it would not look like rivers or roads. It would look like a pulse.

I learned this in silence. As a child, I held my breath underwater, daring myself to last longer than my sisters. My lungs screamed, and the rush of air when I surfaced was both victory and defeat. Later, in the hush of church, I tried to quiet my breathing so it wouldn’t disturb the prayers around me. Breath became something dangerous—proof I was alive, but also evidence I might be noticed. The map began early: hiding, surviving, longing to expand.

Now, in a classroom full of restless students, I see those same maps taking shape. They want rules. They want to know how to write a poem, as if it’s a recipe measured in teaspoons. They are afraid of silence, afraid of the blank page, afraid of being wrong. I lean forward and tell them writing is not a formula. It is a breath. “Oxygen,” I say, “is the flame in the lantern. The tide that carries the boat. The wind that bends the tree but does not break it.”

Some stare blankly. One boy smirks. Another scratches his desk. But one girl—always too quiet—sits straighter, as though she has just heard a map unfurl inside her. That is enough.

Not all breath is generous. I tell them art can suffocate—how words sometimes fill a room like smoke, leaving the lungs burning. I’ve read stories that left me gasping, not in awe but in disgust. Stripped of beauty, crafted only to wound. But there is another way: breath that expands, breath that sings through reeds, breath that swells the chest before a shout or a song. Writing is that breath made visible.

I ask them to close their eyes. “Listen,” I say. “Hear your lungs. That is the sound of your first story.” For a moment, even here under humming fluorescent lights, the air feels alive. I imagine threads of breath rising above their heads like lanterns, each carrying a different map, each burning with its own quiet truth.

Breath maps us in ways we rarely notice: the shallow panting of panic, the sharp inhale of surprise, the held breath of waiting. The steady rhythm of sleep. The ragged gasps of grief. The uneven exhale of laughter. These are landmarks, coordinates, proof of where we’ve been.

When my father was dying, I listened as his breathing changed—first steady, then thinner, then ragged. Each exhale erased a line on the map of him. The silence in the room was not silence at all but a slow unraveling, a tether stretching to its end. The air grew thick, heavy with endings, as though the walls themselves were holding their breath. I tried to match his rhythm, as if syncing my lungs to his could keep him tethered a little longer. But breath is not ours to hoard. It belongs to the beginning and the end. His last exhale was a door opening, and I was left on one side of it, clutching the map of his life with no guide. Yet even then, I knew the map hadn’t vanished. It had folded into mine. His breaths marked me, too. I carry them still, like a river carved into stone.

The ancients knew this. They called it spiritus, ruach, pneuma. Breath as soul. Breath as life. To breathe was to commune with the divine, to share in the act of creation. To write is to join that exhale, to sketch the unseen map of existence in words. When I tell my students this, they look at me like I’m speaking in riddles. But it’s true. The self is drawn not with ink, but with breath.

One student resisted more than the rest. He slouched low in his chair, foot tapping, jaw clenched. Said he wasn’t a poet and never would be. He wanted steps, guarantees. When I asked him to free-write, he froze. When I told him to close his eyes and listen to his breathing, he laughed, embarrassed, chewing the end of his pencil as though the wood might give him answers. But I pressed. “Just one line,” I said. “One breath’s worth.” He scribbled angrily, letters jagged, as if to prove me wrong. But when he read the words aloud—I don’t want to disappear—his voice cracked. For a moment, his mask slipped, and the line was raw, true. He shoved the paper away, but I knew. He had traced the first mark of his map. He didn’t see it yet, but the line would always be there. To witness it was to see breath catch fire into meaning.

Sometimes I trace my own map backwards: the hush of church pews, the deep gulps after racing across summer lawns, the shallow breaths of heartbreak, the expanding lungs of first love. I think of nights I held my daughter close, her chest rising and falling against mine, our maps layered, one breath folded into another. In those hours, I felt the continuity—my father’s map pressed into me, mine pressed into hers, three lives bound by the same current. Breath is inheritance, a torch passed invisibly, one generation to the next. These moments aren’t written on paper, but they live in me like constellations.

Every map has its dangers. Mine holds the places I couldn’t breathe: the choke of anxiety, the press of grief, the suffocating weight of expectation. But even those dark coordinates belong. They remind me maps aren’t just roads and rivers. They’re valleys we rarely return to, forests where we lost our way, deserts where we nearly collapsed. Without them, the whole would be dishonest.

When I write, I follow the map of breath. Sentences rise and fall like lungs. Some passages pant, some sigh, some hold air until the reader aches. This isn’t by accident. Writing is breath translated into language, each word a direction, each pause a crossroad. To write is to breathe into permanence what would otherwise dissolve into air.

And so I return to my students, restless, skeptical. I tell them they carry maps no one else can draw. If they write honestly, they chart paths no one else has walked. Some will ignore me, hungry for rubrics and points. But one or two will close their eyes and feel the weight of their own lungs. That is enough. One map discovered is worth a thousand blank pages.

Oxygen. The only element that matters. The compass rose etched into us at birth, the line we follow whether we notice or not. Every inhale a beginning. Every exhale a letting go. The map of the self isn’t drawn once—it is redrawn with every breath.

And so I breathe, and I write. Breath and beginning, again and again.