The heart is a rhythm; so, too, the breath. The rhythm has functions we do not apprehend scientifically, in part because they are too astonishing to consider in empirical contexts.

With each beat of the heart, our soul is drawn into intimacy once more with the world. Where is our soul drawn ‘from’? It is impossible to say, because it is beyond the capacities of ordinary language to specify. From a position outside time, space, and identity. A superposition of self, if you will.

And each beat draws us down into life as if a magical living fluid were being drawn into the body, the bloodstream, the breath. And so, too, with the breath. The inhalations draw us down and into life; and the exhalations are the diffusion of our spirit into the world.

We inhale and receive the gift of life. We exhale, and become the gift being given to the world.

We are like a leak that happens outside of time and space; a leak whose nature informs and shapes lives, down here, in the strange playground of matter that appears stable, and forms that become familiar. What is the nature of the first moment that hitches the flow to our nascent embryo? Where is that first instant of connection from beyond?

Perhaps it is so ineffable that we cannot discover it. But it is beautiful, and ancient, and mysterious beyond compare.