Your birthright is joy, wonder, celebration, and yes, even ecstasy.

You have an inner awareness that this is true, I suspect. It may be a deep knowing. Even if it’s just a fleeting suspicion, it’s in there somewhere.

Yet, here you are, probably (like most in the west) contextualized in a culture that doesn’t quite support this understanding that life is for joy… or at least not yet. A culture that seems to idolize the story of self-denial and suffering. A culture that believes in winners and losers.

You know that your miracle child self was not born to suffer, or to be cog in some machine or to be reduced to an abstracted aggregated set of biometrics and genetic markers.

Rather… you and me and him and her (and zem and zee and them and they)… we are completely alive and ensouled beings, fragments of the godhead, quantum unlikelihoods, the current pinnacle of 40 Billion years of evolutionary intelligence and the ongoing fragmentation of light into these unique and incredible expressions of consciousness. You are the mother tree for all the seed you drop, you are the ancestor of a future humanity.

Your birthright is the fruit of the earth, and the sunlight and the water and the air and the companionship of other beings. It is the reunion with the whole and the dance of individual expression. It is full possession and indwelling of your own body which is literally made for pleasure through every sensory gateway. You, right here in this body now, life is for pleasure.

This joy is the best of us. The let down and laughter and free expression when we are having fun. Singing gospel. Banging the drums. Spinning in infinity. Heavy breathing in fear and awe as we hit a mountain peak. The harmonics of the dawn chorus when we are still enough to listen. Cumming together with our hearts and eyes wide open. Standing in front of a thumping speaker and letting it move our cells. In serving, in making, in planting in doing and being as and from love.

Many of us have been told you can play after your chores are done. But no, joy is not some dessert, it’s not the fluffy tiramisu after a meal of hard labor. Exuberance is an available signature of every moment of life.-CM