Bring everything with you —
Leave nothing behind.
All that baggage, those things
You are afraid of, and afraid for.
All the tears of the past, all the laughter,
All the things that make you who you are.
What good is an empty spirituality,
One that only wants only the best of you
That tells you those other things are sins?
That tells you heaven
Is a place that only comes after death.
That peace cannot be found here and now?
What good a religion that makes you forget things
You don’t want to remember,
That have scarred you and left you on the ground.
Things you’ve poisoned your own well with
Things you’ve thrown at others,
The ones you’ve walked away from?
This Tao, it takes in everything
It cares not what you think
Or who you love or hate
Or how much you deny
All those secret places inside of you.
The places nobody can know.
How can anyone explain how great it is,
How insignificant,
How high it rises, how far it falls.
Why do we follow Tao?
Because it accepts it all —
All the secrets, all the mysteries,
All the things we hide from the world.
We can bring them all here.
And Tao takes them in,
Uses what is useful
Loves more what is most useless.
Loves everything we hate and fear.
It all comes in and Tao takes it all.
What do we walk away with?
Peace, joy, love, happiness.
Because all that baggage,
All those cares, all those pains
Are dropped into the void.
They are recycled and reused.
To become someone else’s burden,
Or no burden at all.
We have paid our price
We have carried our share.
And we leave it all here.
We take back the light.
Return is the way of the Tao.
So we return from the void
With an empty heart,
An open mind,
A new way of being in the world.
Flowing like water
Spreading Life everywhere
Not asking for anything back
Not holding anything back
It all pours out and finds a way though
A way around and forward to the sea.
Bring everything with you
Leave it all behind and walk away renewed.
Isn’t that what we all want
from our religions
From our friends and our lives…
But who dares to walk the path to the void?
5 Responses
This is beautiful, donna. Did you write it?
Yep…
“Who dares to walk the path to the void?”
What does daring have to do with it?
Nothing so simple as falling, end over end into it.
The only difficulty is in accepting that it might be there at all.
“Leap boldly into the void:
You will not be harmed:
It has no bottom”.
Well, as one who did fall into it, I assure you it probably wouldn’t have been by choice. ;^)
That’s what I mean by who dares — very few do. ;^)
[…] “Leap boldly into the void. You will not be harmed. It has no bottom.” […]