What Is Life?

[The above Gif Art, a series I’m working on, is titled simply “Existence”. }

Life is life.

It’s that simple, but most, almost everyone, gets it wrong.

Life is life.

People with degrees and all the accompanying doodads, people with brains and all the accompanying bravado, those with influence and all the accompanying insistences - all profess that this is alive, this is not alive.

They divide the world into constitutents. Alive, not alive. By default as Levi-Strauss described - clean / unclean.

Yet it is not so.

Life is life.

Everything is alive. Has its beginning. Has its end. Has its consciousness. Has its purpose and design therein. Animism. People don’t like it because it takes them off their pedestals and melts their tin men trophies.

Let me tell a story.

I once, long ago one drunken evening, listening to a conversation, pre, during, post dinner in France. All the usual suspects were there, beautiful people one and all, we were high in the mountains of Corsica. Dukes, discounts (did I get that right?), uber business leaders, singers, songwriters, politicians and even a few religious fellows.

I listened intently to the babble and eventually like all red wine does - it ran downhill to the ocean and into Ajaccio Bay and into talk about God.

God is LOVE! God is you FATHER! God is JUSTICE! God is LIBERTY! (we’re in France after all).

What I heard was a litany of declarations that God is our overlord, our protector, the arbitor of all. He spins the routlette wheel and cashes you out at the casino, this life.

Life is just some system of slavery to some archetypal being.

Then, the dauphine, 6 times removed from Louis 16th, leaned over at me and asked rhetorically, “Hey poet, where is God!?”

I looked for God. I went to a temple and I didn't find him there. Then I went to a church and I didn't find him there. The I went to a mosque and I didn't find him there. Then finally I looked in my heart and there he was. Rumi

And so I picked up a fork and answered,

“God is this fork.” And I continued. “God is this spoon.” “God is that chair and the color of the sky over there.” “God is everything - life itself.”

I must have struck a nerve. Things went quiet. Nobody could believe God is an inanimate object, why, why, why … that’s not something alive, is it? An ant? Ok, maybe. A dog. Nice disguise. But a fork? Come on, you gotta be kidding.

And this my friend, friends, is the problem with all life, all of our lives.

We can never find god because we are walking around with a missing person’s photocopy that has a mug shot which doesn’t resemble most anyone, we’ve ever met.

But I’m telling you, life is life. God is god. God is life. Life is God.

People don’t want to hear that. And I think the reason is - if so, what the hell are they gonna do with their lousy lives? Who they gonna blame? What purpose might fill them?

It’s like the first time you do a crossword and you find out there is a cheat sheet on the last page of the newspaper. After that, there’s no turning back. No more crosswords, you’ve solved them all.

There is no transcendent creator, no god who set the clocks ticking and decides which ones to fix when they falter; nothing exists outside of everything. In other words, my philosophy does not require that I believe in something I cannot experience directly. Emma Restall Orr

So to end.

When you look around at LIFE. When you ask yourself what LIFE is. Do not make it into some big mystery. It is there, right infront of you. It is you, him, her, your dildo, his dodo, their dodo. It is the miracle of all form and all function too.

Which all leads me to the collorary of this story (and a story, alive, LIFE as it is, always has a collorary, like you will too, your residue of memory).

If you are told what is God. If you are told what is LIFE. It is a lie. Like this story too. It is a lie.

You will only know God by being open to the impermanence of existence. The contingency of all, numbers, letters, facts, form, future and ontology. You will only know God by asking your mind to speak what is already, always been, in your heart.

Let go of the hubris - like you see in all the science, all the research, all the improved binoculars and miraculous microscopes. Let go of it all. There is an infinite more that is unknown and will always be unknown. It is unknown because the only truth is that NOW, all the rest is just gossip and snakeoilsmanship.

And when you meet that sucker who asks you about God while believing they’ve met the Buddha. Pick up a fork and stick it in their ass. Turn them over.

They are done.

Move on. It takes a busload of faith to get by.

LIFE is … (use your own noun, verb, thought, adjective, thing, adverb, sound, feeling, smell, view)