The first hints of morning sun peak through the clouds on the eastern horizon. I see them through the openings of the white wall of my beloved home. This Sunday morning there is a faint scent of the ocean borne on easterly winds from my apartment with its steaming Queit Stream just off Gatlinburg some 30 miles due east of us. Today will be another hot one in Tennessee with temperatures above average, in these early days of adjustment to climate change, ranging from the mid to upper 90s. There has been no rain for nearly a week now. None likely today. But for the moment, 80F provides a pleasant space in which to begin this day as always in prayer.

My bare feet touch the good Earth. I offer my usual prayers of gratitude, honoring the directions as I turn clockwise, repeating that circle to send healing energies to those I know to pray for and for those whose names I do not know but who suffer nonetheless. When these rounds of prayers are completed, I turn east to face the rising sun and open my arms to the heavens giving thanks for another day of life:

My God and my All. Thank you for another day of life. I open my heart to you and I give you this day. Make me an instrument of your peace.

And then I consciously take a deep breath.
My recent course on the Aramaic Jesus has made me aware that the air I breathe this morning, the ruha, is a part of a larger ruach, breath/air/Spirit, that has been a part of the Creation since its very beginning. Within that ruach, all fauna find their life. They, in turn, exhale the carbon dioxide that makes possible the life of the flora of our world who gladly return that favor, producing the oxygen needed for the fauna. In this circle of life, we human animals are ever part of something much larger than ourselves, even as we rarely are aware of it.

Life begins for all living creatures when they take their first breath. At that moment, a tiny fraction of the eminent ruach that provides breath for all living beings becomes the ruha of the individual living being. Genesis provides a lyrical description of that process when the Creator breathes the divine ruach, into adam, the prototype human being, thus creating a ruha, the breath of the first human being. At that moment, the adam joins all the life forms that preceded it in the creative process, sharing its own small portion of the ruach which gives all things life..

Our ongoing individual breaths, ruha, make our lives possible, even as they remain a tiny part of the larger breath/air/Spirit, ruach,that ever emanates from the Creator. That is why it is meet and right (and I would add “our bounden duty) to give thanks for that breath each morning. And at the end of our lives, on our final exhalation, we will return that ruha to the larger ruach from which it came with thanks even as our souls return to their Creator from which they came.
This morning in my Jungle I am highly conscious of the breath I draw, a breath I share with all living beings and the Creator from which it came, a breath I am never guaranteed but for which I am ever grateful.