Consolidate Your Joy

Great healing is possible through love : turn your shamanic abilities inward, and love this beautiful animal. Your care and tending it needs. Be true to the love within you. 

Disidentify from that which is not you. Reconfigure around your core and throw out the irrelevant. Be true to your beauty and tenderness.

Too much of life is wasted in fear, and even worse, dread. Learn to enjoy. It is meant to be enjoyed. Do your joywork, which fundamentally consists in pruning that which is not joy, and discarding husk from glume. Then enjoy the glume! But it also means, take time to prepare the feast ; one is worthy of a feast, and the feast is worthy of preparation. Give it due affection and attentiveness : nurture the feast. Then enjoy it. 

Maintain lustiness for life and gusto. Build and replenish and restore gusto : it is your very best resource. This even while life will disappoint many of one's ambitions. Life is not here to fulfill one's ambitions, though it often will meet prime needs, and that often abundantly. Your ambition is subject to your portion of fortune, which ultimately, despite one's best efforts at gambling, is beyond one's control. One's adventures are not guaranteed, even though they are often quite worthy of trial. Sometimes persistence wins the prize in time, sometimes it does not. Ventures are variable in the world's turning. One ought achieve what one can achieve, if it is worthwhile. Yet what is fundamental are not the vagaries of risk, but the authenticity of one's true needs in life : for love, for belonging, for rest and rejuvenation and nourishment, and last but not least, authentic enjoyment and fruition. One must fruit in order to live, but the distribution of one's fruits remains variable, despite how vital their fate to one : here one must develop the deep, abiding faith of the oak in its acorns -- somehow oaks will continue in the world, some variation, some roll of the acorn dice -- while others will worthily feed many, and much become compost besides. There is great beauty and poignant generosity in the oaks. Surely there is wise and old gusto there! Is it nurtured on melancholy? Perhaps. But tempered on faith, perhaps its very lifeblood. Much good comes out of abiding in enjoyment of being. And that is good.

Revel in the sumptuousness of the body's rich experiences, and how it may indraw, as into a vortex, the vibrant variety of the world's singing. Enjoy the deep relaxation of laziness, whether anyone thinks you merit it or not, never ceding your kingship to any, whether they believe all are kings or not. Stay true to that kingdom and its democratic sovereignty -- a democracy not of submission but of multiplication of talent and gifts. Sell out your essential nobility to no one : it is your birthright to reach for with your good will and worthy deeds, and let none say otherwise -- we all have it. Avoid scathe that degrades it, even at good cost -- you will be glad you did. Don't buy into a thrall's worldview, but remain nonetheless a humble king, true to the earth and its pleasures. 

Consolidate your virtues and strengths. Let them nurture your deficiencies into strengths, and not let the latter degrade your strengths. Consolidate, and sum up good things. That is worthy.