I’ve been trying to find the right words for how amazing Prince was, and finally found it — he embodied our true wild nature, one’s higher self, completely in touch with what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls the Rio Abajo Rio, or the River Below the River, the undercurrent of our wild selves, infinite and eternal, a soft intuitive spacious welcoming space free of ego, and as such, encompassing our whole human, mammalian, earthling, universal essence. He was larger than life because he knew all of this from such a young age and took every chance to hone his awareness of such awareness, driven to express it every day, producing music like a bard with a great responsibility to be true to his original unique and beautiful essence, beyond giving any f*cks about being popular, judged, owned or well received. And because of all this, he easily moved us all to find that place inside ourselves calling us always back in our own timeless universal yet uniquely embodied ways; he demonstrated that when you give yourself permission to express yourself this way, the sky is the limit regarding what you can express and how deeply your expression can move others. I hear Prince in so many songs and musicians I listen to daily, from so many genres and lived experiences, and I think all of this is why. In the end he was only human like us all, and had the right to die in any way that he found himself doing so, and we could all only be so inspired and driven to embody the life force we are all granted when we take our first breath into these beautiful bodies we find ourselves in, each one of us an original perfectly imperfect mind, body, soul and spirit. In this way, perhaps Prince would want not for us to be sad, to mourn, or grieve, unless we personally felt moved to, and I think would encourage us to move through those feelings for his passing, and all other emotions we feel for the rest of our lives, with the most courageous will and spirit of generosity as we witnessed him put forth throughout his intense and profoundly prolific career.

Blessed be he made this mark on us, we are lucky and I for one am ever grateful — he’s helped me to see the beauty in my own strong drive to stay true to myself and express my unique essence tightly connected to the root of this planet’s life force like a spiritual umbilical cord harnessing and protecting my essence to cultivate my original creative livelihoods, paths, generous gestures, singing the songs always sung inside our DNA, with timeless love of life, and with the brazen acknowledgement that, though fatefully our bodies are mortal vessels for this universal essence, our creativity and expressions live on forever in the cosmos and contribute to the always evolving luscious diversity of life on Earth and beyond.