I Can't Breathe

Not long after I began staying at home, I got an email urging me to keep a COVID-19 journal. It included this quote from the 19th. century poet William Wordsworth:

               Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

I had resisted writing, unwilling to commit to words the fear and dread I was experiencing. But this quote inspired me. I loved the expression, which was different from the more typical “beating of your heart.”  Why breathing?

I do not know what Wordsworth intended, but two things spoke to me. First, breathing is the way we interact with our surroundings. With each inhale and exhale we breathe the same air as others, air that may be polluted by natural disasters like volcanoes, man-made emissions like coal dust, or invisible corona viruses. The greatest risk of catching COVID-19 comes from breathing droplets exhaled from an infected person. The virus attacks the lungs, which work with the heart to circulate oxygenated blood.  How prescient “breathings of the heart” seems now.

The second way “breathings of the heart” spoke to me is that the Hebrew word for spirit, ruach, is also the word for breath. Our breath is our spiritual essence. I believe that Wordsworth was telling us to write from that essence.  

And then, just as it appeared that the danger of the virus had abated enough for us to be among family and friends again, George Floyd was murdered. A police offer held a knee to his back for almost 9 minutes, ignoring his plea, “I can’t breathe.”  The words of this one victim of racist brutality have become a rallying cry for justice for all victims and freedom for all those who are never allowed to feel safe. To be a Person of Color in the United States is to have your essence as a human, your ability to breathe freely, routinely denied.  

Now I must determine how best to express “the breathings of my heart” knowing that others do not have that right.