Only Breath

 

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim,

not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.

Not any religion or cultural system.

I am not from the East or the West,

not out of the ocean or up from the ground,

not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all.

I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or in the next,

did not descend from Adam and Eve,

or any origin story.

My place is the placeless, a trace of the traceless.

Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one

and that one called two and known,

first, last, outer, inner,

only that breath breathing human being.

Rumi 

(Picture: Down by the river, Louisa Boyd)