Joseph Campbell says ‘People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.’
‘The rapture of being alive’. I contemplate on this. Even very much alive in this beautiful moment, sitting on my chair with sounds of nature filling the room along with crisp, fresh air, from the open patio door, the morning light slowly penetrating the curtain and softly caressing the walls near me, I don’t feel that rapture. But I have memories of such rapture, and they take me to my childhood to the camping trips we took along the Mediterranean. I remember the smells of salty sea air, the fragrant pine trees, and the sun tan lotion. I remember the sand beneath my feet and my sisters’ laughter. I also remember the ease of being, there, out in the open.
Then I remember the Alaska trip we took, my husband, son and I. We were filled with awe at the sight of white mountains, blue skies, glaciers and turquoise oceans, vast and open. The bears looking in our eyes as if in trans, the Iditarod huskies pulling us on the sledge with joy and just the cool fresh air engulfing us into a kind of slowness that forces you to expand and explore. The wonder I saw in my son’s face mirrored how I felt; boundless and wild, maybe because we were out of our regular territory. I wonder if that is one reason that compelled our ancestors to migrate. They must have known that life, and this earth offers so much more than what we are accustomed to in our sheltered everyday lives.
I also felt that rapture when one evening, returning from a Chinese restaurant, my husband and I started teasing each other and ended up laughing so hard, to the point of tears in our eyes. It was the simplicity, silliness of the most mundane things, maybe in that moment we got the joke of life…
That is not all, of many moments I also felt alive among my family as my parents were recovering from their injuries in the hospital from a car accident. The first few days I felt strong, connected and very much alive in the face of this tragedy though I don’t know how to explain it. Perhaps it was feeling the close bonds I share with my sisters at their most sacred depth.
To me, this feeling involves blending into another, and sharing the vastness, the beauty, the joke and the tragedy of life together.
When is it that you feel the rapture of being alive?
