An Excerpt from Lifeletter #7

One of my teachers had a wonderful way of contemplating the preciousness of time: imagine for a moment how much time you spend just taking care of this body: working, driving, cleaning, cooking, eating and sleeping. If you take two minutes to brush your teeth, and you live until you are 75, by the end of your life you will have spent 76 days just brushing your teeth! How much time does that leave you to celebrate life, the mystery of being human, of being alive as this body? And what about your unconditioned being, your awake, alive core--that which is much more than a body, a fleeting form? How much time do you spend celebrating that? How would it be if we could celebrate it all? Both the temporal and the timeless nature of this moment?

Let’s take a moment now, to lie down in the grass with Walt Whitman, one of the great masters of celebration, and listen to him sing a few words from his ‘Song of Myself’:

‘I celebrate myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

…And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
I have no mockings or arguments—I witness and wait.

I believe in you, my Soul..
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.’

with love
Shayla

Photo by Jannaca Chick

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