Life came full circle for me at the lake. I saw a bird carry a fish out of the lake to eat.

Watching with awe and sadness as I witness life for the bird and death for the fish, I see the circle of life played out before my eyes. The primal life cycle in full form. At first, I feel incredible sadness and fear for the fish that is about to die as it wiggles its body in the claws of the bird, midair. It is a sad day indeed for that fish. But then I remember that creatures release opioids and endorphins when near death as they freeze themselves from feeling the pain of dying. It is Mother Nature’s gift to us. Afterward, I felt the joy of the bird refuelling for another day, and its babies lying on the pole’s perch, squawking as a meal was brought to them. They get to survive. They get to have their hunger filled. The fish dies with a gift of freeze, and the birds get to live with their bellies filled. What a grand lesson for us humans to watch.

If only we would actually accept this lesson. Instead, we are consumed with fear of dying and do absolutely anything we can to stop it. The cost is that we live the rest of our lives in a freeze state. We have the ability to shake it off like a deer escaping its predator as it runs to safety, but we don’t. We forget that we have primal survival needs, too, and after a threat to them, our freeze needs to shake off. Instead, we are conditioned to stop the symptoms of fight/flight by suppressing them with all kinds of substances and avoidant behaviours. We are ashamed to experience the surge and purge of the adrenaline released after a freeze attack. We are told it’s bad to have these feelings and must shove them back down into the nether regions of our body and soul. And what do we get from it? A lifetime of living like the walking dead, kind of there but not quite. Consumed with addictions and obsessions on how to keep numbing our pain, anger, fear, and grief.

But we continue to unconsciously face the same threat, as our bodies want to complete the experience. We don’t really see our unruly boss, unsupportive partner, unjust laws, chemical poisoning in our food and medicine, etc. Our bodies go through repeated life-and-death reactions, but these are overridden by social conditioning. We develop numerous chronic illnesses that are then managed with more suppression through drugs. The energy has to go somewhere, and without the rush of survival that feels and moves, it turns into attacks on the body itself. The body desperately wants to release its overwhelming load of freeze, but we keep pushing it down. We learn never to trust our bodies or listen to their messages.

And so our hunger never gets filled either. We don’t feel death, but we don’t feel life either. We are trapped in purgatory in our own bodies and environments.

Yesterday, watching the fish die and the birds live to feed, I felt a big wave of fear and grief rise in my body. Because I was in the lake, I allowed the water to hold me as I rode this wave. I huffed, puffed, cried, shouted, shook, and then sighed when the wave released, and I returned to myself. Then, I felt the truth of life stir within me, and my hunger wanted to be filled. My appetite rose both physically and emotionally. I actually got hungry, which is a sign of being in the rest and digest phase; the peaceful, healing phase of living. And I felt that right to be emotionally fed too. Instead of denying my passions, dreams, and goals for a life of “I should,” I felt a hunger rise in my belly and heart for all the desires I want for myself. All the things that bring me joy, comfort, peace, purpose, and most of all: peace, come up and say, “We deserve this.” “We deserve to live and be fulfilled too.” What an exciting feeling. Alive and restful at the same time. What a difference from the usual exhausted but unsettled feeling I usually have. This is what it means to be here on earth. The rest of my day was spent embodied and present with my world as my vision cleared, the fog in my mind lifted, and I became more creative and wrote. I sat watching the deer roam the fields with little desire to scroll my phone, simply enjoying the beauty surrounding me, and I ate with more taste for my food.

We deserve to be the bird that eats for another day. We are sometimes the fish that dies, but we never fully die, or we wouldn’t be reading this. That moment of death is waiting for a rebirth.