Our bodies

Our bodies 

Are nothing more than flesh and bone
Held together with knotted chucks of cartilage and rubberized tendons,
Muscle and fat laced thoroughly with nerves, and filled with blood from an organic pump.

Organs are just tools
Stuffed inside a sack of skin
Like rusty gears inside the clock that ticks itself to death.

We are flesh  
Controlled by a lump of grey Jello trapped in its brittle prison.
We are born, we live, we die.

We are machines.

Right?

Except there is one crucial detail that elevates us from the mechanics of our bodies
that allows us to dream, to play,
To sit around a fire and contemplate our brains, our thoughts, and our beings.

Point to the organ in your body that makes you smile when a baby laughs
That flutters and quakes when you’re waiting in the wings, about to go onstage.
Find the muscle or lump of flesh that longs so deeply for love
And hurts so badly when it is absent. 

Our bodies may be mechanical 
But we are not our bodies.
You could piece together each and every organ of a human body, fully functioning and in the proper places 
and it would not be a human. 

To be a human is to be a sperm and an egg
To grow inside your mother
To be directly funneled trauma along with pre-digested nutrients as you come into existence
To be born, into a world of light and confusion
To take your first step 
To love
To hate love 
To have crisis and struggles, to realize you won’t be alive forever
To witness death, and be unbelievably terrified 
And then accept that one day you will die, so you should make the most of your life as it is.

To be human is to sit in a field on a sunny day,
look around you
and breathe a sigh of contentment.