Ever doubt how connected we are? I propose a little journey. I want you to take a deep breath and sigh slowly. Hear that sound that hiss, that slow and whispered “S” sound you’re making? Now take this into consideration.
The letter “S” as it is written even has the properties of the sound. A snaking and meandering letter that weaves like a dancer across the page. You can imagine the ruffle of a dress or the slide of a socked food on a hardwood floor when you write it. Every language on earth has this sound and some phonetic way to illustrate it on a page. That letter is the sound of a sigh. But it goes deeper.
Imagine yourself outside standing in the rain. The noise of the rain hitting the trees and the grass and the landscape around you indeed sounds like nature sighing. It glistens and rolls off of tin roofs and forms bubbling puddles and writes its own letter “S” in its own language. The sound of the rain is a sigh. The letter “S”.
Imagine a snake in the grass on the hunt for its next meal. The snake flicks its tongue and uses it to determine the next direction he goes. As you walk up on the snake, he warns you that he is there. You hear the slow and threatening hiss of the snake as he releases his breath in a warning not to come any closer to him. The snake is sighing. The snake is using the same letter “S” to mark his territory.
The wind, that unseeable force that surrounds us and cools us when we are hot and chills us when we are cold. It rustles things in its path. The leaves in the trees, the grass in the fields. It howls around corners and tunnels its way down city streets. There, again, the letter “S” is present as nature is breathing and gusting itself across our lives. Nature is sighing, but in doing so is spreading seed and rain to continue her growth.
Listen to the creek running and dancing toward a destination that it isn’t in control of. It washes over rock and soil, slowly eroding it over time and bending the landscape to its will. The creek sings with a singing song of S’s. Sometimes it even shapes itself to mimic the letter. The river sighs and whispers just as we do.
Listen to a log smoldering within a fire. The timber struck and lying in ember as it gives itself to create heat and light. Using its last song the wood hisses as it is consumed by the flame. The flame has a voice and it speaks in the letter “S”. The wood is sighing its death song, but it is going out with a show as it harbors the undulating flames upon its body. The flame is speaking in the letter “S”.
If knowing that the same sounds that you create while breathing and whispering, whether in exasperation or contentment, don’t show you the connection to everything, then you simply aren’t paying attention. We are of the earth as much as we are on the earth. Synonyms abound when you watch our lives in parallel with the world that existed before and will exist long after we are gone. I inhale deeply and sigh, knowing that I am in harmony with everything.