Sorrow prepares you for joy

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

― Rumi

The becoming and being, simultaneous.

To allow life to touch us deeply, profoundly, to crack our hearts wide open and let more in we become similar to the Japanese art, Kintsuji.

We start to relax into the nature of the intensity of being available to life and simultaneous death within it. We see that like the apparent brokenness of our humanity, what Spirit becomes to us in those moments are like the gold filling and repairing what was into a whole new version of itself.

Whole and also more than before.

From the vantage of Spirit, you were never broken. You always are.

And from the vantage of human, the intensity of the unknown, the loss of control to make a desired outcome manifest, to desire something it cannot will to be, to make someone love us who is not open to love, to sit in this space of loss can feel like hell is real and in those moments within the pain of separation, it most certainly is.

Yet the turning towards what hurts, uniting ourselves with the source of that pain and suffering, we become.

Being and Becoming, simultaneously.

We are both, and. Neither, or.

Yet what is magic is that no matter what *you* choose to align in, *you* still are what you are.

Even at the depth of your humanity, all of the cracks that are present are still filled with the gold of Spirit and known whole and Holy.

The freedom of choice allows you to orient your awareness to whatever you choose. Being and Becoming, both simultaneously.

Whichever you choose, know that you can always choose again.

And at some point, in the exhaustion of doing, surrender happens.

This "surrendered-doing" becomes a choiceless choice which knows that whatever is chosen, this has at its Source, love. There is then, no wrong choice, only learning as in expansion and becoming.

Love at and as the Source as the field of consciousness behind and as all that Is.

And we can surrender ourselves, learning to rest within the whole as our wholeness as Being.

Being and Becoming, both simultaneously expanding and contracting as the breath of Life itself.