Spring Cleaning

 

I like to think of life as a constant stream of upgrades. You can be coasting along and one day realize that it’s time to upgrade your food choices, or fitness routine, or maybe it’s time to start meditating. 

 

Or maybe you’re minding your own business but for some reason quotes about love keep surfacing and normally you just brush them off yet you find these to be really interesting and moving… maybe it’s time to think about your heart and check in. How are you heart? Are you open? Are you closed? Are you walled up behind a maximum security fortress? (Pretty sure I just told you what part of my spring cleaning is going to be!) 

In the interest of full disclosure I’d like to share with you what seems to be my next assignment. I don’t think its always what I want to work on, most of the time it’s what I need to work on. In this case I’ve been seeing a very clear nudge from the Universe as to where I should be starting my Spring Cleaning:

I’ve been finding the concept of home and emptiness crossing my path a lot lately. I was reading Rumi Wednesday night and in one of his poems he speaks of craftsmanship and emptiness. For some reason it really hit home:
(Not the whole poem, I skipped some parts)

“I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though, 
is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!

Dear soul, if you were not friends 
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?

The beauty of careful sewing on a shirt 
is the patience it contains.

Friendship and loyalty have patience
as the strength of their connections.

Feeling lonely and ignoble indicates
that you haven’t been patient.

Be with those who mix with God
as honey blends with milk, and say,

‘Anything that comes and goes,
rises and sets,
is not what I love.’ “

Thank you for your patients reading that! Honestly tho I had to say it blew my mind. The messages in that piece were, and still are, floating in my mind being digested slowly. The next morning at Tai Chi my Sifu was talking about the forms and the uses of the forms in fighting application. (In case you didn’t know Tai Chi is a martial art, the forms you see people doing are very slow fights lol) So he was explaining that if someone throws a punch this move is used to create space. Then he proceeded to talk about how Tai Chi is about creating emptiness. To find the emptiness and use it, to make it, to resist the desire to fill space. It was an explosion in my mind.

These were the two biggest moments but there were smaller ones throughout the week. In fact one Rumi quote had to go on my bathroom mirror. “If light is in you heart, you will find your way home”