Mountain Breath

You are at altitude. The air here is different.

Thinner at first. The body notices. The breath needs to work slightly more. This is the mountain teaching its first lesson: you are in territory that will ask more of you, and the asking is good.

Find your breath. Up here it is more visible than at sea level. You can see it, almost, in the cool air. The breath as something real and visible. A small cloud each time you exhale. Evidence of you in this landscape.

Breathe in slowly. The mountain air is cold. You will feel it in the nose first, the specific cold of altitude, clear and clean in a way that lower air is not quite. Draw it in slowly, because cold air breathed too fast goes in without benefit. Slowly. All the way down. Let it reach the places of the lungs that shallow breathing never visits.

At the top of the breath, hold. Not holding against something. Holding with the breath. The way a mountain holds its own summit, not straining against gravity but simply present at its own height. Your breath at its height. The highest point of this cycle. Hold it for three counts.

One. The mountain is still. Two. The air on the peak is always slightly colder than below it. Three. You can see for kilometres.

Now out. The long slow exhalation of altitude, all the way to the end, the lungs empty, the belly drawn in at the completion of the out-breath. Let it all go. Mountains do not hoard. They are the most generous of all landscapes: giving the longest views, the purest air, the most sky.

The mountain beneath you is very old. Older than you have a number for. The rock under your feet was once the bed of a sea, or the interior of the earth, pushed upward over millions of years into the shape of here. You are standing on the history of the earth. Breathing the air at the top of that history.

In again. The mountain breath. Slow. Cold. Pure. Filling you.

Hold. One. Two. Three. Stillness complete.

Out. Long. Total. Everything released to the mountain air.

This is the breath of high places. The breath that clears the accumulated fog of lower altitudes. Every in-breath is a cleaning, the pure mountain air moving through you. Every out-breath is a releasing, everything you carried up the mountain placed here, on the rock, under the sky.

In. Slowly. Cold. Clean. Hold. The high still place. Out. Long. Total.

You have altitude inside you now. The mountain's quality is in every cell.

In.

Out.

The mountain does not rush. Neither do you.

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