It happens all too often; we allow our lives to empty us. The stress grows without, the pressure builds within, our light fades. We let our responsibilities pack away our joy, and keep it hidden from ourselves until we forget we even carry it within us. We cover our radiance with masks that divert and deflect the attention of the heart eaters, and our intention to nurture self.

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time

reassuring each other that  our costumes of identity are on straight.”

~Ram Dass

We feel our souls, every once in a dark while, clawing to get out. Our lungs fight to expand after being solidified by shallow breathing. If we are brave enough to ask our hearts what they want from us…the answer is “unbind me~set me free”. Our voices are rusty from lack of use when the words are fluttering like frantic birds to be freed from the gilded cage of a sorrowful silence.

“At every moment of our lives

we have one foot in a fairy tale

and the other in the abyss.”

~Paulo Coelho

We long to step away from the travesty we perpetuate, but our limbs have fallen asleep from a lack of hope. We are weakened from the endless bleeding of a thousand shallow cuts from shattered dreams left untended. We long to be Lazarus rising from the dead, so we keep waiting-desperate to hear a voice that commands us to rise and come forth.

We feel us in there sometimes when we’re very still. We hear our name spoken in the silence between heartbeats. In the gap where anything and everything is possible we understand that we are our only hope, we create our own reality, we are the key to free ourselves from ourselves.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”~Anais Nin

So now the pain of opening our eyes fully to see what flickered briefly in our peripheral vision~was that life? Do hearts implode from lack of use, or is that tearing feeling coming from each one pushing themselves free of the razor wire that binds them? Now comes the time to claim our sanity, or insanity, whichever is the opposite of our current diagnosis. Now is the time to quit ignoring the whispers of faith, the voice of our truth, the face up screaming into the heart of the universe that we live.

“We are only as blind as we want to be.” ~Maya Angelou

See with the eyes of the living, tear that heart wide open, leap fearlessly-trusting the wings of the soul to maneuver the storms that come.

Live a life worth living goddammit, before the face you see on the milk carton at breakfast is your own.

“Do not weep, for she is not dead but sleeping.” ~Luke 8:52