We take about 23,000 breaths a day, but most of us only notice a handful of them. The first gasp after crying. The deep sigh of relief. The held breath of anticipation. But what if every breath we take is telling us a story about belonging?

The past two days held different kinds of tests.

The first day pushed every fiber of my being. After learning my lesson with the snow and my car days prior, I came up with a better plan. The result? Still stuck, but this time my car hung precariously over the edge of a ravine in heavy, wet snow, after sliding. Not better at all.

With no cell reception and hours of energy expended attempting failed efforts to free my car, I thought the dogs who knew this forest as their home might lead me to the closest house where I could ask a human for help.

They delivered on that, but not before bolting into the dense woods for a joy run which left me no choice but to follow their tracks up the hill through eighteen-inch snow depths in an attempt to find them.

Fast forward to having found help in gracious fellow humans whose house was a few miles away, Randall and I returned to my car to begin the excavating while Kris and Lori held onto the pups at their house.

The snow was falling faster than we could shovel it away and the rubber floor mats I'd used for traction earlier once again proved useless. It was with sheer 'pretend your baby is under the car and you must move this to save its life' intention that we began to see hope in about a foot of movement.

Eventually we got my car unstuck and safely on the road, and in nature's final twist, my helper's truck found its way into stucksville, followed by my car becoming stuck once again. Just so much shoveling. So much pushing. So many falls.

Randall and I had to laugh - and it was that sudden release of nervous laughter that revealed to me just how scared I'd actually been.

Yesterday was different - a day of necessary unraveling.

In crisis, you just keep going, pushing emotions aside to stay focused on what needs to be done. But the body keeps score, and eventually needs to release what it held.

So I let myself cry it out, sleep it off, and drink it in with a carrier of red wine allowing all the feelings that had been tempered in service of survival to finally surface and be seen.

Yet in reflecting back on both days - the doing and the feeling - I notice how breath became my silent partner through each challenge. Without conscious thought, I used it to regulate my system, to stay clear when clarity was crucial, and align myself with the energy of solutions, not the problem.

My body remembered what my mind sometimes forgets - that I belong to this wild place now, even in its moments of testing me.

This raw experience brings me back to a deeper truth about breath that I've been learning.

Like air forced to bend at harsh angles around city buildings, I spent years unconsciously twisting my breath to fit spaces that weren't meant for me.

In Ohio, this shallow breathing was normal - I knew nothing else. The twisting was so familiar I couldn't recognize it as twisting at all, like a tree that grows bent from birth might not know it's bent, or like a bird who's forgotten she has wings.

These shortened breaths weren't a conscious choice - they were my body's natural response to an environment that no longer served my evolution. Like a plant turning pale in too little light, my breathing had adapted to survive rather than thrive. 

Then came Michigan. Standing atop the dunes overlooking Lake Michigan in 2018, my legs trembling from the climb, I found myself physically breathless yet somehow breathing more fully than ever before.

It was a paradox I couldn't ignore - lungs burning from exertion while simultaneously experiencing something that felt like remembering rather than discovering.

My body knew this feeling, even if my mind had forgotten it. Here, with my feet sinking slightly into warm sand and Lake Michigan stretching endless and teal before me, I experienced my first reunion with my original source. This was my first glimpse that air could flow differently, and that I could breathe differently.

But it was that first morning at Swan Lake in Montana where everything changed - where my heightened awareness cracked open to what had always been true about breath, about belonging.

The fog wasn't just hovering above the water anymore; it was alive, like the lake's own exhale made visible in the cool morning air. Everything breathed there, but not as separate beings performing separate acts.

The pines drew in the same air that the deer released; the squirrels inhaled what the lake had just exhaled; the rocks themselves seemed to breathe through their ancient pores, releasing stories of winter's past.

In the end, breath isn't just universally shared - it is quite literally the universal exchange itself. The air I breathed at Swan Lake that morning was once drawn in by ancient cedars, carried over mountains, and will continue its journey long after I released it. 

Breath is filled with wisdom from the collective, awaiting our presence in a single, conscious moment to deliver what it holds. 

In this way, we're all participating in a single, endless breath - the most basic and profound reminder that separation is an illusion. We belong to each other, to this Earth, with every inhale and exhale. It's that simple, that universal."