Medicine for Life

different brushstrokes...

Jul 09, 2026

What is attunement with “Life” force?

Does not “Life” as we know it, in all its inscrutable wholeness, include evil, destruction, entropy, chaos, psychopathy, war, disease, hurricane, comet strike, alien probe?

Or do we selectively define Life with only the “light” side of the light/dark continuum?

What about the mundane middle, the forced choice, the innocent mistake?

Fire on the mountain: is that Life?

Corporate alpha also translates, as do the rest of us chattering apes.

Which of us claims the brand (Life, Human, Identity), and what’s the pitch?

In this corner, “Do what thou wilt.” Across the ring, it’s “Serve the Lord.”

Now battle it out. Fun science experiment, for the junior high mind.

What is the primal Lifeforce emotion?

Passion, curiosity, lust, love, empathy, bliss, equanimity…

Is it embodied and embedded within the body of that soul, in its earth place and evolution, its place and time, its circumstance and karmic stage?

It can be rage—at injustice, or at Nature herself, or God, or gods, or fate, or flat bad luck.

It can be innocent gratitude, for the simple blessings: flower, sunray, kiss.

It can be immersion in the drama—playing, as even Krishna counseled, your role. Yet, he cautioned, without attachment to results.

It’s all played out in the dance of elements, the cycles of life.

Words: the tools of our trade

Even so, we lean back on words, the tools of our trade, as “humans”—by definition—and, literally, tools of trade: whether hunting–fishing–gathering–farming, or in barter–diplomacy–commerce–statecraft.

For better or worse, it’s our bed to lie in (accidental pun).

Despite its rampant abuses, it’s defeatist to characterize language as “fallen,” “flawed,” “jaded,” “maya.” Accept the gift, and celebrate words as tools we have to work with—subject to creative use and evolution, and capable of expressing emotions and ideals, memories, dreams, reflections… even if it’s gathered around our digital campfires, chewing the nonfat.

Like the rifle and snowmobile for the Inuk hunter, or cooking pot and CD player for the African villager… might as well exploit it.

Thus, the wordsmithing poet sayeth: no ideas but in things (William Carlos Williams)

Language joins the garden of earthy delights: whether in fiction or nonfiction.

Either way, what are words, outside of trade talk, but to share our human experience?

And for the required resonance and full channeling of that experience, what is its core emotion, to transmit and receive?

Language shares with music, as creative expression, the same motivation—to tell a story, convey a mood, evoke a place, speak for the soul of its people.