Just breathe.

I keep telling myself to “just breathe” a lot lately. I forget this too easily, the tight knot in my stomach is slowly forming a diamond — not the pretty kind, more like a cloudy lump of pressed carbon. When my chest is tight from life’s many stresses, my breathing stays shallow, pretty much only in my mouth, a bit into my lungs.

Maybe there will come a day when I will feel that I have the space to really let my breathing go, even beyond the lungs, into the stomach, eventually diffusing softly across the diaphragm, then spreading to my arms and legs. Maybe it even ripples back inwards, it’s warmth and comfort enveloping my heart.

Maybe some day, in a future of unknowable distance, my breath just keeps on going, until it expands even beyond my body, perhaps filling the room, the rest of the house, into the fields beyond, across the mountains, up into the sky, and out into the vast cosmos, where it eventually expands into the entirety of my soul.