Life Likes Living

If we can distill one single essence

from the wonders that surround us,

it might be this: that life likes living.

Let’s say it again: life likes living,

life perpetuates herself with ease,

grace, and unfiltered generosity.

The Earth is thirsty; there is rain.

Creatures are gasping; watch;

seedlings and shoots are growing.

The trees they become give us

our own capacity to be nourished,

offer shade when the fire sun,

doing what it does best, emits

the heat that sustains our time here.

The world is glowing, ever-creating,

you can see in in the tiniest things,

the small flower peeking through

the concrete we’ve laid in hopes

of asserting a semblance of control

where we never really had any,

for more than an uneasy little while.

Life likes living, and will persist

in this, an uncanny triumph as great

as our capacity to be and to imagine,

and of course they are the same.

Our imaginations, too, have no end,

they grow and are fed on the same

rich soil from which everything comes.

We are tendrils growing with the trees,

we are stars piercing through the night,

and it is only when we choose to be apart,

to regard nature’s beauty as though

we are not embedded right inside of it,

that we compromise its right to flourish

and the unbearable pain begins,

because we’ve forgotten life’s love of life.

May we remember the heart of us,

borne of earth’s blood, skyward bound,

and serve the life that we are with joy.

 

– Tammy Takahashi