What do you love about being alive?

 

If any one of us was suddenly confronted with death, we most likely would find ourselves desperately scrambling to stay alive.  One might ask, "Why?"  The drive for survival seems to be innate.  It is our ego's primary job after all.  But aside from that, what is it that holds us to life?  What is it that we love about being alive?

Starting from the ground up, do you remember running barefoot as a child on the good clean earth, or squishing mud between your toes?  I do.  And it was such a great feeling.  Now I enjoy massaging my feet with a whisper of local olive oil, thanking them for all their good work, carrying me, before tucking them in between the covers of my bed each night.

Our knees and legs gave us cartwheels and skipping in our youth.  And what fun that was.  Now my legs bend and leap with dancing.  They kick me through the water when I swim.  They move me through my day with scarcely a thought and I am so grateful.  

In our still somewhat sexually repressed society, it almost seems scandalous to bring up sex, but who isn't grateful for the juicy and life giving pleasures of our sexual organs?  When I was a teenager, the mother of one of my friends used to speak of the three great pleasures in life: defecation, mastication and fornication.  Two of these happen in the area of our root chakra and aren't we grateful for both?!

Moving up the torso, our internal organs go about the business of life, day in and day out, cleaning our blood, distributing nutrients, pulling air into our bodies to fuel us on our way.  Our heart and gut tend to both the physical and the emotional side of life.  They bless us with inner knowing, self-protection and best of all, love.  Be it love for our families, our children, our friends, or cats and dogs, or nature herself, 'Isn't love grand?'  It brings such sweetness to life.  

Then there are our hands and arms with which we can hug others, write books and letters, sculpt in clay and prepare beautiful meals.  How blessed we are to have our hands and arms.

With our throats, our voices, or mouths, we can sing, 'whisper sweet nothings,' and eat delicious foods.  And our eyes let us take it all in, every delectable spectacle, from the colors of the rainbow or butterflies in flight, to the foods we eat or puffy white clouds floating overhead in the big blue sky.

Then we have our minds, fleet as starlings.  They flit over the details of our lives, processing and categorizing them, bringing forth insights and inspirations from on high.  Our minds let us engage in conscious awareness and bring to us our sense of oneness.  Thus they let us imagine the Easter bunny delighting children in late spring, or allow us to know just what it is like to be a rabbit dashing on swift feet into a safe little burrow, or a hawk soaring overhead, eager for the next meal.

From here, it is easy to step into our crown chakras, our inter-connectedness with everything, our part of the vast creation of life, of the sacred, of the spirit, of the Divine.  We have come in all of our creative glory, arising as it were, from this vast celebration of being into our own unique selves.  And I stand here now, in Gratitude, for every bit of my life, every step of the way.

© Josephine Laing 2019