Have you heard the Eagles’ song Love Will Keep Us Alive? Released 30 years ago, it is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. I’ve heard it hundreds of times over the decades and yet when I listened to it recently, its beauty sent me sailing in an unexpected way.
For many years, we’ve been hearing the outcry of the human existential song. Nuclear obliteration. Insufficient food supplies and clean water. Daily, more than 25,000 people die of hunger and more than 15,000 are children — when there’s plenty of food to feed all of us. Massive storms, floods and war. Rape, sex trafficking, genocide. Colossal use of pharmaceutical medication to combat anxiety and depression. Suicide… Repeat… Repeat.
Souls are in despair, globally. This is not a pretty song. How could we not be afraid?
Watching “the news” feeds our consciousness with fear. Stories are chosen that speak from fear. The reporter starts talking and Oh, no… Gasp. Begin shallow breathing. Lock your door. Get your guns ready. Stockpile food in your basement. Wear a mask and stand six feet apart. Isolate or die.
Our mortality is being shoved in our face by the metacrisis we created.
Our choice for fear over Love is killing us.
Having spent college and the first 10 years of my career in the environmental field, I’ve felt fear up close. We’ve been abusing our life support system, choking her lungs and clogging her seas with plastic. Imagine choking and clogging the life support system in a hospital ICU. What do we expect? It’s scary.
How about this — let’s stop running around scared of our own body’s death. To truly feel freedom, we must accept our mortality. When we do, a heavy weight is lifted off our chest. We see that life is now. We feel truly alive, filled with the beautiful desire to express our own unique self.
If you haven’t yet “seen the Light” inside of you — the galactically gorgeous spray of divine stars glimmering in your being — this is your invitation to see it. Now! Ask Spirit, God, Love, for help.
Get out of your mental head and move your body in a way that makes you feel totally alive. Before a job interview, I like to walk around at a cemetery and feel the mortality, the lives passed. It helps to ground and humble me. It helps me remember that the only time I’ve got is now.
Love brings us alive while we’re living, and Love keeps us alive when we die.
Let me humbly admit that I didn’t “get the memo” in an easy way. It took five years of horrid monthly migraines, a massive brain tumor, brain surgery and a near death experience (NDE) for me to expansively “see the Light” of the one moment we’ve got: the moment of now.
Seeing death’s face up close helps us wake up to —
Life!
Life.
Living!
Being alive.
My God, what an ecstasy laden existence this is. It is also an inconceivably atrocious “reality” we’re living in, so my dearest darling you, for all it’s worth…
CHOOSE LOVE. Choose to see, breathe and live LOVE.
Love is the Light that illuminates darkness.
Choose the joy that Love wants to feed you.
Choose people who uplift and see you, who you uplift too.
Choose to feel good, come together and enjoy Life while you’re living.
If an extremely unfortunate situation greets us along with the last breaths we take, it isn’t a full basement of food — and it certainly isn’t a gun — that will give us Life. It is Love. When we need food for our children or a sense of safety, it is those relationships we’ve invested in with our time and attention, that will provide us with deep breaths of comfort.
Alas, the Eagles were tuned in — that great thing called Love will keep us alive.
When we take our last breaths, it is a feeling of being loved that will make our final breaths peaceful, sending us into the realm of timelessness with sunlit, oceanic beauty swimming in our souls. And I’ll tell you from having “seen the other side” in my NDE, death is not actually death; what we call death is actually rebirth into a whole new landscape of Light.
Here’s the song. Play it loud, let it in and with every part of your blessed, breathing being, feel it.
Time to champion the huggers. For very good reason, let’s hug more.
Blue Zones, an international organization promoting human happiness and longevity, just released a piece on The Four Health Benefits of Hugs, written by two professors of Neuroscience, Natural Science and Psychology at Liverpool University.
Hugs help us maintain relationships. Hugs reduce reactivity to stress. Huggers are less likely to get colds because they boost our ability to fight infections. Hugs improve sleep and reduce anxiety.
And for those of you who aren’t huge fans of hugs like me, good news: you can hug yourself. Or your pet, or a tree. My first blog post was Why PDA Puts the Universe in Bloom (March 3, 2015), a tree-hugging salute to the power of unabashed touch.
Be well~
Jessica Rios, Leaning into Light