Ad Breath July.

It's getting hot out here. Beryl has raced across the ocean and so many Caribbeings are picking up and piecing their lives and living back together after her lashing. I was looking at the winds swirling like a bele dancer’s skirts and between the swirling and the complete determination to do exactly what she was going to do I remembered Beryl McBurnie.?

Beryl McBurnie “took the people's scholarship” and her good self and went to study dance at Columbia University. Later, she trained with Katherine Dunham and Martha Graham. She came back home and started recording and documenting - to snatch great swathes of local culture out of the jaws of impending oblivion.

She investigated, learned and taught what was about to be lost as the memory keepers died. She turned he mother’s house into a performance space -?The Little Carib Theatre. If a show called for more space than the Carib could hold - Beryl would shut down the street - police permission, what?

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”

― Martha Graham

In Yourubaland Oya is a river goddess. Oya is an Orisha of winds, lightning, violent storms, wind and transformation.? Many of her devotees made the passage across the dark water, that middle passage?Derek Walcot writes about.

…The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History.

“First, there was the heaving oil,

heavy as chaos;

then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,

and that was Genesis.”?

- The Sea is History (excerpts) Derek Walcott

A Dutch friend was reading Walcott and for a moment it sounded so strange…until…I realised the rhythm was different. If you read Walcot without taking the sea into consideration, you miss the cadence. If you listen you’ll hear the inexorable rolling in and out of the Caribbean Sea onto Caribbean shores.

The thing about the waves is that they keep rolling up and rushing out.

One of the great gifts that breathwork has brought me is an understanding of that "in perpetuity." A constant arrival, a constant leaving.

“jubilation, O jubilation -

vanishing swiftly

as the sea's lace dries in the sun,...

and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound

like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.”

- Derek Walcott

We tend to want straight lines but and, linear life is not a thing. Life sometimes feels like it’s spinning out of our control, what author and researcher Bruce Feiler terms "lifequakes."?

Storms can wreck our reality. What we’ve built can wash away or be broken beyond repair.

Lifequakes are not anomalies. They’re integral parts of the human experience. The average person encounters three to five of these transformative events, each lasting around five years. That's 25 years—half our adult lives—spent in transition.

We forget the transition from water to air. We will come to new places. Always.

About new lands - This month I’m doing a free workshop at DCTT Called Life and Breath. Thursday, July 18, 7:00 PM AST. A lil’ breath-nerding, a lil word-nerding (aka imma be me) and a Conscious Connected Breathwork Session...Send me a DM if you'd like to attend.

"Breath understood as a metonym for life itself ... has often acted as a philosophical first principle.

- Arthur Rose?

Special Offer: 20% Off Online Breathwork Sessions. Check out CCB FAQs, Do’s and Do’s if you’ve never done one before. I’m offering DCTT Workshop participants and newsletter subscribers a?20% discount on all online breathwork sessions through the hurricane season.

Consider your breath. Consider your might.?Consider looking around and lending a hand however you can. The breath washing through you is part of the ocean of air sweeping across the sea at 200 miles an hour.?Life Ad Breath.

Best,?

A