Listen to Life

By Yaisha Vargas-Pérez, poet and mindfulness teacher, for the blog A Mystic Writer

Listen to life whispering
through the flake-like seed landing on your table
or the one sprouting inside your fridge.
They’re asking to be sowed.

It may seem random
but there were five random “errors”
after the Big Bang
and here we are.

Rocks collided randomly
for millions of years
and they formed a planet.

For eons, casually, meteors rained
bringing pieces of ice
that formed the oceans.

Accidentally, another planet crashed against Earth
and from that fortuitous collision a moon was shaped,
and regulated the impossible tides.

By chance, furious magma burst forth to the surface
creating islands on the oceans
which settled and cooled.

And thanks to the incidental distance
between the planet and a star
whose yellow light reached the shallow depth of ocean,

Bacteria came to be.

A child of collisions, the ice meteorites,
the carbon in the soil, the scorching magma,
and the moon regulating the tide.

Bacteria later grew up as trees.
Trees turned carbon dioxide
into oxygen.

And humans arrived.

Formed from mud, clay, soil, and water.
            The broccoli from the soil turns into our bones;
            the beans, into our skin, eyes, and hair.
            The wind turns into our oxygen,
            and our body is 3/4 parts the water of the meteorites.
            From the Sun and its fire, we get our temperature;
            with that energy we can digest food.

We are children of this planet that birthed us
and of the elements that formed it.

So, when a flake-like native oak seed landed in my room
I saw the same cosmic coincidence
that has been around for 14 billion years.

We call it Universe.

I planted the seed in a pot
because I heard it saying,
“I want to be a tree.”

That is our purpose as humans.

So, when you open a fruit
            and its seed-embryo has sprouted in your hand
            you have witnessed a birth.
            Plant it!

When a cat follows you meowing on the street
            even if you don’t know her,
            she is asking you to feed her, to love her, to give her a home.
            Help in any way you can!

When you see an ocean full of garbage
that is the home of other species.
Help clean it!

When someone is lonely and needs to talk:
Listen to them!

Connect with everything else you are
since the beginning of time.

It is a privilege to have a body
and walk in it:

You are a sparkle of the Big Bang.
A consciousness embodied in a being
aspiring to know your vastness.

The Universe speaks to you
listen to it in your guts.
In its words there is freedom and happiness.

I invite you to be human.