BEST FRIEND by Monica Hathaway
If you wake up feeling low, unhappy and unappreciated, do yourself a favor.
Brighten up to existence. Start with appreciating the wonders of your body.
Attend to the beauty of its breathing. Of how it’s able to inhale oxygen and put it through its blood stream and use the best of it and exhale the waste that is not useful to its living. Carefully study its excrementious nature. It’s genius, moment by moment, of using the food that enables it to reproduce the cellular system and ridding itself of that which would clog it.
Praise it for its ability to use the liquids you give it to drink by sending it to various organs and systems, using the life giving vitamins and minerals and leaking out the waste matter that it doesn’t need.
Appreciate its intelligent handling of the solid food you put into it. How thoroughly it churns it through the systems and organs and uses the energy to feed all its cells and send out the waste matter in neat little piles or lumps.
Appreciate its cleverness in leaking out excess liquid through the pores of its skin in the heat of the weather or the heat of the various motions you give it to perform. It knows how to stay cool.
Praise it for shivering when its cold to let you know its need for warmer clothes.
Tell it how wonderful it is to know to leak sad thoughts, through your eyes and nose, so they can pass out of your space and give you room to feel happy in.
Let it know how wondrous are its sense organs of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and consciousness, the beauty of the nervous system that tells you the fire is likely to hurt, so please back off from it and that you just got a thorn in its foot and that you should remove it before it festers and becomes a nuisance.
Thank it for the gift of sight that shows you the beauty of forms and colors that grow or walk or crawl on the earth and the wonder of the flight of birds in the sky. Thank it for the gift of being able to hear the varied sounds of the beings of this world, the birds, the insects, the animals, the fish and the humans. The sounds of the wind, the rain and the thunder. Bless the powers of its elegant nose, the sense of smell that brings the fragrances of the drink and the excrement it rids itself of. The smells of others: humans, fish, birds, animals and all other forms in the space.
Praise its sense of touch that gives you the pleasant feel of the tender caress of your friend and your tender touch on the body of others, and the warm touch of the sun on your face. Savor in its sense of taste as you dip its tongue into a strawberry ice cream cone or a ripe juicy tomato or a glass of milk or other forms of food you choose to stimulate the taste buds.
Bless it for its sense of consciousness which choreographs events, using all the functions of the other five senses as its dancers. Bless the sense of consciousness for the genius of remembering events and even imagining places we have not yet traveled to and beings we have not yet seen.
Embrace the wonder of its urge to reproduce its varied forms and colors as it moves through the raw, wild, estatic, passionate dance of creation. Now return to attending its breathing, the inhale and the exhale, and appreciate the peace and the calm of its steady flow.
Appreciate this wondrous, beautiful, physical being, your closest companion, through your whole life, and your best friend. You will never be lonely again and you will never again serioulsy consider being the perpetrator of death for the body of another.
Brighten up to existence. Appreciate the genius of the physical universe.