Leave to the night

'Don't go back to sleep,' Rumi pleads. Awaken to the day, to your heart, loving and life. Life and love have so much to share, but sharing means you too must engage in the conversation. So much awaits, don't go back to sleep. And sweet mercy, to awaken with such hunger, excitement and abandonment, that when others, the world, my own negative thinking says that I can't do it, too great a risk, to throw my hands up like a child and squeal,

"I would love to kiss you."

" The price of kissing is your life."

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,

"What a bargain, let's buy it."

-Rumi

Leave to the night the sleep and its dreams, they are the door calling us forth into the day. Don't go back to sleep.

Cup of Tao

The Tao says the function of a container is in its emptiness. I remember weeks ago, having just cleaned the kitchen and mopped, I made my treasured coffee.  When the beep sounded, saying it was ready, I entered a kitchen with coffee pooled on both the counter top and floor.  I had forgotten to empty the old.  The new had nowhere to go, no emptiness to fill.

Yesterday’s walks birthed the whisper to the trees of “I am completely stripped of all.”  This morning, Life whispers back, “I know.”  Carved, molded and baked in life’s kiln, the cup of my sweet life, in its emptiness, awaits her filling.  But in truth, it is not the longing for the filling, but the emptying of the sweet nectar to give others drink and then the return to readied emptiness…to be filled yet again.

I cannot pour what has not been filled.  I cannot be filled without being emptied.  Trust.