A Note on Process


Close your eyes and focus on your breathing.

Breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out.
Relax your bladder, but not too much.
Breathe in breathe out.

You are in a bright field on a summer's day. The sun is warm and the bees are buzzing nearby, but not so much that you are worried about being stung.

You are enveloped in the warm sun and you slowly slowly slowly slowly slowly drift into sleep in the shade of a hedge.

When you wake up -
don't open your eyes, breathe in breathe out -

it is night, and a nearby jasmine bush calms the air about you with its perfume. You are floating in a cloud of sweet marzipan and your hayfever is mysteriously gone.

You take one long deep breath, drawing the scent into your lungs and breathe out. And again breathe in -

This time, as you inhale, your consciousness travels into your body with the scent. You are rushing into your nasal passages, through pipes and fleshy tubes, down towards the oesophagus and breathe out.

You breathe in again, deeper still. You are a speck of pollen - information added to matter! - rushing into your nostrils, down through your oesophagus, into the bronchial passages, where you linger, weightless in the red dark and breathe out.

And you take another even deeper breath, speeding without inertia through mucal canals, the warm red dark of the throat and the bronchial tubes, then burst into the wide cavern of your left lung - the wrong one? - floating in the vastness, a meadow of villae like twinkling fronds of seaweed, a meadow of grass, Atlanta's farmland, glistening with mucus.

You float gently, weightless, your consciousness free of fear, free of desire, free of all the worries in your life, including whether you left the soup boiling on the stove before you began.

You are a weightless speck of pollen in your right lung, a molecule of scent. You roll with the energy of unseen forces onto your back and float downwards, settling with a small fleshy spring, on the top of a giant villae, which is now scaled to the size of a hillock beneath you. Only the open space of your lung above you, inflating and deflating, and the soothing thrub of your heart beat in a distant chamber, means anything.

With the speed of the miniscule you evaporate, through the skin of the villae you are laying upon, into the warm pace of blood. You are a speck of consciousness, in your own blood. With every thrub of the heart, you are thrust into the incoherent rushing of tubes, capillaries and veins. You ebb through the red pipes of your body's funnels and sphincters, the warm traffic of corpuscles and platelets nothing more than a brush stroke on your awareness.

You thrub at lightspeed through the chambers of your heart, a sad, rusting boiler room, crushed and uncrushed, and you scud through the aorta and down into the arteries of your bowels.

A strange thrust sideways and you are in your left kidney, drawn towards the tall net of the membrane. where you are filtered, the membrane passing through your consciousness, your consciousness passing through your kidney's filters, then down through a tube, into the broad, stretched sphere of your bladder, the curved walls rubberish and marked with the irregular lines of stretched wrinkles.

With a flush you are dashed down, through the puckered muscle at the base of your bladder and through your narrow urethra, towards an approaching yellow light.

You emerge into the daylight of your stream, an ochre shower. Your being is cleansed, the bad things in your system, all your consciousness, your thoughts, worries, these have been purged away.

You have only the animal of your body left. You are pure, with nothing but the fading warmth of your passing and the scent of foxes on a doorstep.


© George Ttoouli 2009