breathing with the forest

see this gorgeous video here

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We imagine ourselves as sealed-off individuals, but we are inextricably embedded in a web of life. Our bodies are porous, suffused with the world around us, home to thousands of microscopic symbiotic inhabitants; with each breath, we exchange parts of ourselves with the wider world. Our connection with trees is particularly intimate—oxygen they exhale flows into our lungs and through our blood, coursing from the heart outward through fractal-like branching arteries to feed every cell in our bodies.

Breathing with the Forest is an experience of deep continuity and reciprocity with a Capinuri tree (Maquira coriacea) in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. Inviting us to see inside its hidden pathways, this multimedia journey brings us into relationship with the rhythmic interchange of breath that keeps the forest—and us—alive. Entering the forest, we step out of our separateness to embody something much more than human.

The rainforest is a place that dissolves the borders we construct around the self. When we look closely at the web of interconnected, symbiotic relationships sharing nutrients, light, and breath, we discover that our idea of separation between one being and the next is an illusion. In this interactive experience, digitized projections of oxygen and water vapor molecules traveling through the trees’ xylem and phloem and the subterranean mycorrhizal network are visualized in a five-second cycle—the average pace of a human breath. By synchronizing our breathing with these larger cyclical rhythms, we begin to feel the continuity between body and forest, expanding our sense of self to include the planet around us.

This digital forest is a detailed recreation of a section of the Leticia region of the Amazon rainforest in the southernmost tip of Colombia along the Amazon river. This area is home to the Ticuna people, who inhabit the wider Leticia area alongside the Witoto, Inga, Tucano, and Nukak communities who have stewarded the land for thousands of years.

—Marshmallow Laser Feast

Emergence Magazine

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That which speech does not illumine, but which illumines speech:

know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be thought by mind, but by which, they say, mind is able to think: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which is not seen by the eye, but by which the eye is able to see: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be heard by the ear, but by which the ear is able to hear: know that alone to be Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be breathed by the lungs, but by which breath is in–breathed: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

—The Kena Upanishad

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