A Sky Full of Lungs

By Sol Runemaster

I was on my way to Tai Chi when the sky got crowded. Seven, maybe nine balloons, low over the arroyo east of the house, each one lit orange on the side facing the sunrise. I never made it to class. I stood in the ditch by the road for the better part of an hour with my mat under my arm and watched the whole thing drift. It was not the colors that kept me there, though the colors were absurd and I am glad no one was around to see me grinning at them. It was the sound. Every so often a burner would open somewhere out in the field, a long soft roar, and then nothing. The balloons went up in the nothing. ## The Loud Part and the Lifting Here is what I noticed, standing in the cold with sand in my shoes: the burner is the loudest thing in the valley and it is not what lifts anybody. The heat is. By the time you hear the flame, the lift has already been made. The air inside that envelope is

thinner and warmer than the air around it, and something lighter than its surroundings cannot stay on the ground. Nobody pushes a balloon up. You warm it until it stops agreeing with the ground. That is the whole trick, and it is not a trick at all. I have been learning that same sentence in another language for years. In Tai Chi you do not rise by hauling yourself upward. You rise by getting out of the way of it. My first teacher used to tap my shoulder when I tried too hard and say, less engine, more river. It is the same in a sound bath. People brace for the gong because it is the loud one, and then the room goes quiet and something inside them has already moved. The loud part announces. It does not carry. ## A Balloon Is a Lung A balloon is a soft bag that becomes the shape of whatever it takes in. So is a lung. When I say that to people at a sound bath they usually give me a polite

smile, and then somebody starts breathing differently without meaning to. We were taught young that breath is a chore the body handles while we think about other things. Watching nine balloons take the long way up, I kept thinking that breath is closer to an offer, and that the answer was yes the whole time. I have a shelf of books on Kabbalah and theosophy that I read slowly and badly, and the ones I return to all begin the same way. Not with fire. Not with light. With breath. The old teachers were not being decorative about it. Air is the one material you can take into yourself and still be the same person afterward. It does not ask you to be worthy of it. It asks you to open. Those balloons made a whole morning out of that single motion, repeated. ## What I Have Been Holding Down Two invitations came this season that I have not told many people about. One to lead a Tai Chi session at

a wellness conference downtown, and one to teach for a week at a desert retreat out past the mesas. Both of them good news. I have been treating them like weather I might get caught in. Here is what I did with the first one. I rewrote the same session plan eleven times, sanding the corners off it so nobody in the room could disagree with anything I said. Somewhere around the eighth draft I stopped being a teacher and became the host of a party where I was afraid the guests would not like the music. That is my version of standing on the burner. Working harder on the noise so I do not have to feel the heat. Perfecting the announcement instead of trusting that a room can rise on its own once I stop filling it with my own voice. The retreat is harder to explain, because a week of unscheduled mornings with sun and sand and long slow practice is what I have been describing to students for a

decade. I have been circling it the way a coyote circles a fence line, close enough to smell the other side. ## The Ballast Question Nobody steers a balloon by gripping it. The pilot vents a little hot air to come down, drops a bag of sand to go up, and then hands the direction of his whole morning to the wind. The craft is release, in small deliberate amounts, plus the honesty to admit he was never the one who decided. My ballast has names this year. One is the version of the retreat where I already know how every morning goes before I arrive. One is the belief that a sound bath has to land on people a certain beautiful way or it did not work. One is the small ungenerous hope that if I put the whole thing off another season, I will feel more ready when I finally get there. None of those sandbags is evil. They are just heavy. Ballast is what keeps a basket level in rough air, and there

is a season for carrying it. The trouble starts when you keep hauling the bag long past the point where the ground has already let go of you. I sat with my journal the morning after the balloons and wrote down what I was holding. Twelve lines. Four of them were things I could set down that same day. I put two down before breakfast, and the hours afterward felt lighter than they had any right to. ## Closing Reflection By the time I finally left the ditch, the balloons were small enough that I lost the baskets first. Colored curves walking off toward the Sangre de Cristo, then dots, then a sky doing what a sky does when it thinks nobody is watching. What I carried back to the house was this: nothing in that ascent was held up by force. The desert heated a little air in the dark and the sky did the rest. Nearly every good thing in my life has arrived that way, and every time I have tried to

keep one in place, I found out how much I had been mistaking grip for warmth. So if this finds you standing in a cold field with your mat under your arm, waiting for a version of your life that is lighter than the air around it, I would bet it already is. Warm it. Say the true thing. Let a little air out. The sky has been waiting to do its part since before you got there.