Timeless Exchanges

When you breathe in, you are not just filling your lungs; you are participating in a timeless exchange. 

Our breath is the oldest thing we share with the world.
Every inhale is an intimate reunion with what has always been — ancient air that has circled this Earth for billions of years, breathed by trees, whales, and even the first humans who looked up at the stars in wonder.

The oxygen that enters you was once cedar breath, newt breath, and wolf breath. Carbon atoms that leave your body may one day become part of a rose petal, a thundercloud, or the breath of a newborn. The breath is a bridge — between body and spirit, between past and future, between you and everything that has ever lived.

As air enters your nose, it spirals and swirls around these curved shelves, called turbinates, which are truly like tiny turbines. Each one is a thin, scroll-like bone covered with a soft, vascular mucous membrane — think of them as finely tuned air filters lined with a living, breathing cushion. They warm, moisten, and clean the air. This is your body’s first alchemical transformation: turning raw outside air into breath ready for your lungs, heart, and spirit.

Themes of skin, nose, lungs, and immune system all arise this time of year. It’s all about the respiratory and excretory systems.  On the trembling edge of my awareness, I perceive the strange vulnerability of my lungs, so deeply protected in my chest, and yet entirely vulnerable, available, connective.

Your lungs want to know: have you been breathing? Like really breathing through your full bounds? Do you let yourself inhale and exhale everything, taking and accepting all that life brings you?

Wind is the invisible movement of global planetary breath, just waiting to fill you with its stories of all that it has seen and felt and rubbed against. When you breathe in the wind and the vastness of its animacy, you might pause, listening to all that it knows, you might wonder about its life, why it howls, wails, weeps, but perhaps also soothes, cleanses, caresses your face. There is an essentialness in the way the wind reminds us to play, the way it moves stagnation and teaches us about change. We easily overlook the importance of wind and the way it influences sea currents, helps the trees shed their leaves, or cleanses a forest of dead branches. 

It feels increasingly clear to me why the wind, as a living being, a spirit, a deity reigns over the fall season. We are in the long exhale of the seasonal cycle, what in Traditional East Asian medicine is considered Metal element time. There is a long breath out, a slow sigh from the land, a falling downwards towards the earth, a letting go, perhaps even a soft sense of heaviness or loss. 

Wait, but why metal? It seems a little less, well “elemental,” compared to water or fire for example (I promise you, those ancient Taoists were on to something!) As the cosmic axis is tilting further downwards, in our bodies we might subtly begin to feel the weight of our metals, the calcium in our bones and teeth, the copper that makes our red blood cells, the magnesium regulating our blood pressure, and the zinc that helps with wound healing.  

Many of these metals support the electrical system of the body, the spark of our cells, the generation of metabolic energy, the formation of DNA, and the release of certain hormones, acting as catalysts, like a thunder for many crucial biochemical reactions. 

These mysterious metals form the foundation of us and when we look around in our world, we find some of these same metals in the soil, stones, and elder mountains, like an ancient substructure that forms the very skeletal system of our bodies, the earth and cosmos. Metal has always been emblematic of alchemy and transformation. Turning lead into gold. Here we find a sense of releasing, refining, and stripping down to what's valuable, meaningful, essential. Metal element season is about culling back the unnecessary, reforging our connection to our deepest knowings, and remembering that there is stardust up there and also in here. 

I am really feeling it in the changing light levels. Dusk feels really different, earlier, lower, like the earth herself is dipping downwards, inviting me to purposely step into the dark, and with each step, with each passing day, I am wondering what it feels like to not fight, to not resist but to willingly enter this long tunnel, this passageway to inner earth, with its smell of iron, its fertile stone blood. There is no turning back. There is no reneging, no reversing the seasons, the elements, the death process. Each step brings me closer to the world’s silent chambers, caves of glittering minerals and metals, ever closer to the womb of winter, that immovable germinal place of rest. 

I am hearing from many that they are grateful for the forced seasonal slow down this year. Wishing you purposeful pacing, softening, slowing.

What I’ve been reading:

Returning Home to Our Bodies: Reimagining the Relationship between Our Bodies and the World—Practices for Connecting Somatics, Nature, and Social Change; Abigail Rose Clarke

Bodyfulness: Somatic Practices for Presence, Empowerment, and Waking Up in This Life; Christine Caldwell

Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World; Thomas Hubl

What I’ve been seasonally shifting towards…

Going to bed earlier!

Eating lots of root veggie soups and oven roasted veggies

Calling back in a regular breathwork practice

Adding in a Reishi tincture to get ready for winter

Wishing you clarity, curiosity & connection,

Kendra

Excerpt from the Seasonal Love Letter: Metal Element style, '25

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