6:23am. Black morning. I’m happy to be alive. I’m happy to be here. I’m happy. But not really. Happy is such a flip floppy emotion like a fish on the bank. We confuse happiness with the absence of suffering which is actually peace. Peace is not something. It is the absence of all things. It is the absence of clutter.

The empty body is full of light. All of its cells twinkle and sprinkle the world with their sparkle. The twinkle is always there whether we notice it or not. But the emanating glow can be obscured by an accumulation of debris from yesterdays trapped inside along with all their flippery feelings.

It’s like the drain under the kitchen sink. Just one little thing has to go down by mistake and get stuck. Maybe it’s a small bone from last night’s chicken dinner. The water still goes down but not as easily. A bit of noodle gets wrapped around the bone, then an apple stem gets stuck in the jam. Tiny things, peas, seeds get caught too. The dam is now dense and obstructive. The water flow really slows. Stagnation. Damnation. It begins to smell. Nothing new can be processed. Any intake just adds to the stagnant water in the sink with its blocked drain.

When the pipe is cleared, and the dam released into a bucket on the floor, the odor is atrocious. Still, we cannot help but be curious about the origin of the stoppage. It is so fascinating to see bits and pieces of past meals, undigested, intact, albeit rotten and soggy, stuck in a tight wad. There in the middle of the muck you find the little chicken bone. Oh.

The pipe never needs to be changed. Life’s system of flow from tap to sink to drain and through you, the pipe, is always perfect. Sometimes it simply gets clogged with our paraphernalia, souvenirs and cumbersome carry-ons. Lifetimes can be spent treading in the stagnant waters of our own making. When we remove what is blocking the drain we lose everything except who we are. In a moment of sparkling clarity we realize we are not a sink, nor water. We are an instrument of flow.

You never need to be fixed. Just strip down. Take off the old stories, the heavy opinions, the layers of rigid knowing. Unzip that yesterday you wear like threadbaren jeans. Remove old bruises, erase past pain. Weed out the day he said you were no good and never would be. Flush out your fossilized fears of not fitting in. Nothing ever needs to be repaired, just removed.

You are here so you have a form. You have a form so you have a purpose. (But keep it clean and uncluttered.) Life gushes through pipes shaped like people. 

Of course it is fine to flip and flop along the way (hey, we’re human). But never let how you feel obscur who you are. I am an instrument of the divine. And so are you.