Photography as a Spiritual Practice: Oxygen and Hearts
Guest Writer: Eve Turek
“i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)”
e.e. cummings
As I type this, my 89-year-old husband is in our local hospital, with what appears to be a combination of some chronic congestive heart failure and a viral respiratory infection, perhaps even viral pneumonia. He labors hard to breathe. Nurses are attentive, trying to manage a medical fulcrum between pulling off too much fluid and causing dehydration versus not getting enough fluid off the lungs, and between giving more oxygen than his lungs can easily expel as carbon dioxide. I learned from my mother’s emphysema decades ago, the lungs must efficiently breathe out as well as in, or the very air that sustains life will suffocate it if not released.
Oxygen. We can live a certain number of hours without water, and even days without food. But we have to breathe. We have to have oxygen. I watch the nurses confer and finally agree late in the afternoon to supplement my husband’s natural breathing with some nasal oxygen. Immediately, his breathing rate slows, and he relaxes into his first short, real nap of the day. Now he will not be so exhausted.
Oxygen is both an atom and a molecule. As a single atom, it is very unstable. It wants a partner, wants to bond, seeks to oxidize, to unite with another atom. The oxygen we breathe, on which our lives and the planet’s life depends, is a double molecule comprised of two oxygen atoms that have bonded together. The nurses do the test to measure the amount of oxygen in my husband’s blood by putting a monitor on one finger, reads his “pulse OX.” I think about “ox” not as a beast of burden, but as a graphic endearment—hugs and kisses. OXOX, the double molecule of oxygen, O2, hugs, and kisses.
My husband and I have many friends and family praying for us. I get texts asking for updates, sending little emojis with hearts. All the love of those who know our situation sustains us, lifts us up, helps me to breathe a little more slowly, a little easier, as I say my own prayers for his ease as he breathes.
When I left the hospital this evening, I spotted a heart in the pavement behind my vehicle. It was faint and subtle, a darker dark in the black asphalt of the parking lot. Something spilled there and left that exact reminder for me to find. I remember e.e. cummings’ poem, and I remember Psalm 73:26--my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.
I receive God’s love, His tenderness, in that heart in the darkness, and in the love of our community of loved ones praying and sending their best thoughts and wishes. Truly, our hearts are being gently and lovingly carried, even through the darkness of gasping for breath. Truly, Love is our oxygen, joining us each to one another, joining us all to our God.
Eve Turek