This life is so cool

Every week the question arises - what should I write about for my Thursday morning rohn report? Nothing seems in focus, no inspiration. And then, inevitably, at some point during the week, something speaks to me and it’s like ok, I can write about that. This week it was on a Sunday that it came to me: oh yes, I shall write about that.

In the morning I had a sleep paralysis event. I was in my bed, that much I was aware of, but I wasn’t completely asleep and I wasn’t completely awake. I wanted to get out of bed and jump in the fish pond, wake up, feel the cool water wash over me, feel the cool air on my skin, the world alive and real, but I couldn’t move, or could barely move and only with the most extreme effort.

I was trying to lift the bed sheet off my body so I could get to the edge of the bed and from there, I believed in my half awake stupor, that I could stand up and walk over to the fish pond and jump in. That was my frame of mind, but I just didn’t have the strength to do it in my half paralyzed state so I laid there helplessly.

Suddenly I woke up. Ping! I was lying in my bed alright, tangled up in the sheet, but nothing else was quite the same as it had seemed in the ‘dream’. I got up, stood up, walked outside and dived into the pool.

Floating there among the Hydrilla, gazing at the Pickerelweed and watching the fish swimming below the surface of the water I suddenly had a vision of the blessed sacrament (is that where Sacramento comes from). Anyways I saw it as a huge blessing to be alive, that everything I ever wanted had been given. That actually even more than everything I ever wanted was right here, happening right now, just by being alive. That was really cool. That’s where I got the title for this post.

Later, sitting in my office, I could hear the sound of children singing from down the street. How beautiful I thought, like a calliope, like some small village deep in the rain forest where children sing spontaneously in the morning, like some tropical island where children sing on the beach, maybe like the New Orleans neighborhood back in the 1910’s where Louis Armstrong as a little kid would go door to door singing for a dime.

Turned out, it was my wireless headphones sitting on the table nearby leaking out the soft sounds that seemed so far away and pleasant. Actually it was the music for this podcast that was playing. Samba de Orfeu if you want to watch the video clip.

Later still but still morning, I got up on my bike and rolled out. I noticed the wind on my skin, the clouds in the sky, the trees standing sentinel and waving hi as I passed by. I thought about all the amazing features that we have because we’re not asleep, we’re not dreaming. Our senses are super acute: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, feeling - we all know about those. But the sense of appreciation that they bring us is way more than just the sensation itself, and the appreciation for being able to appreciate - that’s something so sublime it could be called divine.

This life is so cool. I rode hard down Broadway, exulting in my divinity and my high speed bicycling skills. Both seemed related. By the time I got to Press I had reviewed all the amazing features of being alive in a human body on a planet that I could think of. Legs, wow, extendable and bendable, walkable, even runable; hands with fingers attached, articulated, strong but nuanced, delicately sensitized so they can feel things too, the body electric as Walt Whitman might say, infact did say. The whole entire everything, as big as you can perceive and of which there is no end, I believe (and that may be my religion that there is no end). Eternity is here now, infinity is contained in a grain of sand - William Blake said that.

The blessed sacrament remained for the whole day pretty much. Only recently have I begun to lose it. And lose it I will, I always do. Then I have to discover it again. Maybe that’s it, it has to be renewed not remembered. Not every moment will appear as luminous as that moment in the pool but the luminosity is still there. It starts with me, somehow. I need to find my own luminosity and then it appears everywhere.

This life is so cool.

music clip from Orfeu Negro