The wholeness of our authenticity consists of light and dark and needs time in both worlds to ripen and refine. The original nature of each living being is revealed only as much as one is ready. What is new and forming, rough and cloudy is clarified and polished by keeping one’s heart open, especially in times of breaking.

The pain of dismemberment that you have endured is a sacred path of beauty carrying the medicine of maturation, deepening, and the growing of strong roots and broad wings.

When we imbibe the heavenly waters that nourish all life on earth, we can reflect upon the sacredness of this incredible voyage that also happens in our bodies and psyches—where over and over, season after season, like water we rise and fall along a great journey that works us, changes us, and forms us over lifetimes.

Whoever you are, no matter where you are in your life dance, don’t lose sight of your pilgrim soul and follow unabashedly without expectation. Without beginning or end, there is a lodestone at the center of your being you can find by heart.

In the midst of the bursting exuberance of spring, it is easy to forget that growth is also contingent on inward acts like letting go. Growth is mostly not smooth and happens in stages, each one requiring courage, faith, trust, and death. Birth requires much dying. Immense suffering is often the result of not knowing how and when to die, and that its simply okay to let go.

Whether seed or human or other than human, each miraculous unfolding begins with an exquisitely beautiful and sometimes painful unimpeachable calling forth. To ensure our unfolding, longing is stitched like a golden thread into the fabric of our being like a homing instinct that we can follow.

Ling Xu tells us that no matter our circumstance we are not powerless, and that there are ways to engage with mystery and dance with the Dao as it lives in us and all of existence, allowing life to emerge and take shape in new and unexpected ways.

As the fiery sun engages in its wildly passionate dance with the earth, it penetrates the boundary of flesh and melts the outer edges of our being, guiding us toward ripening like the earth who flowers all around us. Places of vulnerability or wounding reveal new insights.