The Unborn call me.
Come! they sing.
"How shall I come?"
Follow this breath.
Walk barefoot in the nightuntil you find a mushroom,
the toe of Dionysius
buried upside-down in loam
where He suckles
at the planetary teat.
"But where shall I, who am no God,
find this nipple?"
Return on a breathto the center of each proton
in your body.
The milk of the underworldis black and sweet.
And the jolt of arriving
right here! in your own flesh!
is the electric flower
of the universe.
Now the Ancestors call mefrom the bruise of dawn
on the first day.
Come! they sing.
"How shall I come?"
Follow your inhalation.
Yes, I hear angels of fire,
air, water, and stone.
Come, they sing,
fall into your diaphragm,
your abdomen, your loin.
Sink into the blossom
of annihilation
through the gravity
of this breath.
Somewhere even deeper
inside me than I am,
stars extinguished long before
their light has reached this world
whisper my electrons
out of emptiness.
Galaxies whose distant
magnetisms whirl
the sun in my sacrum
call me to taste
a timeless respiration that evaporatesthe dream of distances.
Come!"How?"
Ascend on this breath!
This is why I sink, I drown
in the wilderness of the interior.
Where the soul cannot go,
I rise by uncloaking.
Within my rind is the ocean
of what, once rotted, ripens again.
Within this ocean is the fragrance
of mind, flavored with the silence
between thoughts.
And within this darkness is the fire
of eternal chaos,
the bliss storm.
"And what is within that nectar?"
Death.
Go there to be born.
Go there each morning,
and every sunset.
"How?"
Follow this breath.
Stay, endure, embrace the pain
of your hollow places
and be whole.
Gather the flames
of numbness from your marrow
like sheaves.
Harvest the seed of tears.
Crush your unbearable disappointmentsto an umber chrism the color of skin.
Spread it all over.
Spread it all over the earth and moon.
Bathe in the secret musk of what
you already are.
Chalk mandala by biology teacher Caryn Babaian
Follow This Breath
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