The Sacred Mess Of Being Human: A Reflection

It's been said that the gods or those on the other side are jealous of us because we get to inhabit the body.

So after years of studying consciousness,

Dream states,

Energy,

The nervous system,

I've come to believe this.

There's something sacred about being in a body because we feel.

And emotion,

Especially in the body,

Is a language that only the living get to speak.

So that saying about divine jealousy is just a metaphor,

Of course,

Because in most traditions,

Once you leave the body,

You no longer experience emotion in the same way.

So you probably wouldn't feel envy or joy or grief the way that we do.

But it points to something else.

There's a unique beauty in this human experience.

We carry pain,

Heartbreak,

Uncertainty,

But we also get to feel things the soul can only remember from a distance.

We get a whole joy in a cup of coffee,

We get a cry from music,

We get to be overwhelmed by beauty,

Smell,

Memory,

And touch,

And yet we take it for granted almost every single day.

So I'm at the farmer's market this morning.

I'm listening to a band playing on the corner,

And I didn't just hear the music,

I felt it move through me.

I tasted the richness of the coffee that was in my hand,

And I felt the sun on my skin like it was waking me back up.

I noticed a woman with a cat strap to her back,

And a man in retro clothes was riding a bike in these slow,

Deliberate loops.

A dog licked the body oil from my leg as it passed,

And I had one of those rare moments where I thought,

This is it.

This is what became her for.

This is the human experience.

And someday when I'm no longer here,

I could remember this with longing.

I could envy the one still in body,

Still in time.

It's likely someone will miss my enjoyment of those times.

I wish that they could still share it with me.

So maybe the point of all of this isn't to escape the human experience or bypass the pain we feel,

But to feel it all while we still can.

To stop waiting for life to begin,

To notice more,

To remember that every ordinary moment is anything but ordinary.

Because right now,

You're in it,

And that is something that even the gods,

Or those who might have passed,

Had actually missed.