BREATHE. YOU ARE ALIVE!

There are days where inspiration pours out in endless quantities, and then days where inspiration must be picked like rice grains, with silver chopsticks. There is no doubt that the days have shown me kindness and profound morsels of beauty, even as I attempt to delicately maneuver through the unrelenting currents. In fact, I have found true moments of peace in the oddest of places (amidst trance-like meditation on a treadmill! on the john! driving down that deadening stretch on the Bonnet Carre spillway!), a vibrating hum of energy coursing through my veins with feverish irregularity... and from these moments, a resulting contentment would ensue, that knock-at-your-door reminder that we are, in fact, ALIVE.

I used to walk down the sidewalk, my head down, lost in reverie, on a classically sunny Berkeley afternoon. The spray painted words on the side-walk, "BREATHE. YOU ARE ALIVE," would suddenly pop into vision, dispelling me from my quiet, detached self-absorption as I recanted all my daily "to-do's" and sonorous cerebrations.



I would suddenly stop, part my lips in smile, remembering, Wait! This is my life and by jones, I really AM alive! A breathing, walking, talking and living embodiment of all things contained in the universe. Excuse the cheese factor, as I have my Eckhart Tolle moment and retreat into New Agey- talk, here. But there is a sensuous delight in knowing that your visceral senses are somehow in complete accordance with your translucent, immaterial body and that every moment is a part of The Grand Scheme, in just the same way a pixel makes up an infinitesimal quota of an image. Those moments escape us rapidly, filtering through our larger lives like sand through the fingers. But if you catch them quick enough, remembering to pause and tilt your heads in wonder, you may find that that life is chock FULL of the individually isolated moments that lend meaning to our lives. We may, in fact, remember, through our very breathing, labored or still, that our existing is no small undertaking, and that that, my friends, is short of being the greatest miracle of all.