The Deep Breath I Would Take

Good morning, world!

I breathe in deeply as I walk out to the recycling bins down the driveway, a breath of pine, of oak, of warming sun filtered through trees, of fine-ground French roast coffee on my fingertips; not yet of frying onions and meat (the Italian Sunday lunch smells).

I am happy to be awake to a new morning.

I am happy to find this, a similar thought and feeling, from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sunrise”—

What is the name


of the deep breath I would take


over and over


for all of us?  Call it



whatever you want, it is


happiness, it is another one


of the ways to enter


fire.

image:  Autumnal morning light, Western Finland, Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho