Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Filling Choice

"Your joy can fill you only as deeply as your sorrow has carved you" (K. Gibran).

As deeply as I treasure Gibran's writings, innately this passage has troubled me for it seemed to suggest that in order to know joy we had to be carved by sorrow. Were we not born to know joy? Why then must sorrow cut and hollow our souls?

Watching a child reach for what she wants, pondering that one of the first muscular movements an infant learns is reaching, falling to my knees upon the lake path reaching in tear'd joy towards the gifted feathers, Life whispered the quote in a different voice. All spiritual, religious and inspirational wisdoms speak of being filled. Even enlightenment is a filling.  One cannot fill what is full. The vessel must be emptied. In its emptiness the vessel reaches and draws in its filling. It is not a carving. It is the hands of yearning reaching into the clay of my heart and soul's vessel, emptying all else so that the rivers, the blush of sun and moon, the dance of wind and grass, the touch of another's heart and eyes, the One Song of Love may stream in and fill. 

Two threads remain. In emptiness we reach...in reaching we are filled.  In emptiness we reach...in reaching we are filled...by what we choose.  

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