I imagine this is the kind of question that makes sense only once you've had an alternative experience.
I think about a vision I had once while meditating in a cave in the Himalayas along the Mother Ganga.
I was in all darkness, cold, but not so cold, lost in the darkness until I smelled- something earthy- fecund, perhaps- and above me I felt a sort of spreading warmth. I pushed up against- who knows what- it was so dark there was nothing visible- and a pressure below and within urged me to keep pushing, pushing, and above me the warmth kept spreading and then opening and softening and suddenly I burst through and I could see I was a sprout, and rapidly I watched "my life" pass before me, I grew tall and slender and bloomed and around me were all roses and I was a rose and I could smell the blossoms and sometimes I yearned for the sun and sometimes the dew came and I drank and I laughed and sometimes night fell and I closed in upon myself, and eventually I watched pieces of myself, pink and vibrant no longer, now falling all around me and scattered by the wind, and then...
It was over.
And I think this is what it is like to be alive.
Of course the monk in India will have many different experiences than the woman in Los Angeles, and both of us in 2021 (or 2007, or 1984) have a different experience compared to 1532 or 400 BC or a million years ago, in a way.
But we are all made of stardust, so...
To be alive as me right now means a million different things. It means constant interruption by the world, intrusions into my thoughts and my writing and my music, and yet if I shut everything out for fifteen blessed minutes or an hour suddenly there is an eruption and someone, somewhere needs something; I need those things for means of survival, for paying bills and not shutting off technology that provides my income and dreams to flourish, I find myself lonely without these relationships in my life, I am not just contained into one singular being, me and my thoughts, I am actually myself and my relationships and my works and my intrusions and my culture and the nature that precedes all of the above-
And to be alive now also means to expand greater than the sum of all those fears and needs and hungers and devouring desire and to
Shrink back into the demand of this moment, the essay I have assigned myself for a novel I can never stop thinking about, a character who wakes me up in the middle of the night, her need to be alive when she has never yet existed outside of my brain and words I type endlessly into a slim silver screen with a keyboard attached, listening to Cosmic Dancer on repeat, a song that doesn't even have a thing to do with the story of the character (let's call her Joan) or the time in which she actually would have been alive had she been a "real" person, but in listening to this song and allowing myself to just forget myself and my name and let myself dance myself into the tune or is it the tomb
The feelings that swell inside of me
Of being alive
Joan, she wants these things too,
You, me, the reader, the writer, we want these things,
To know constantly that
I am
that I am alive
that I am dancing,
out of the womb, right to the tomb,
now I'm just copying a great songwriter and all is lost once more.
And this is being alive.
But this slim silver screen, this keyboard, they are, right now, a part of me, and therefore as alive as I am, which is approximately at 67% because if I allow myself the full awakening of my existence my head begins to explode but
here it comes, can you feel it?
You're reading this, you're alive too, can you feel the soft expansion at the edges,
the light urging your forward out of the darkness toward the warmth and the gentle pressure to
breathe, to breathe, to breathe to
feel all that shit you didn't really want to you had been ignoring you had been
where had you been
where have you been all this time?
No matter, you're here now.
Let's dance.
