Hanging out at our Key Largo base tonight, watching movies with my instructional team for an Everglades course starting next week.  Last night we watched "Motorcycle Diaries"; tonight it was the 1994 classic "Awakenings".  Do you remember it?  Robert De Niro plays a coma patient who miraculously recovers 30 years later.  He could be bitter, but instead he's too busy dancing, eating, and making up for lost time - and is stunned to see the people around him wasting theirs.  After noticing all the depressing news in the paper, he exclaims:

"They got it all wrong!  Life is good!  Remind them how good it is... People have forgotten what life is all about!"

I often wonder about people who sell their time for money.  I don't mean everyone who works - work is life!  But The Prophet says if  you cannot work with love in your heart then better to be a beggar in the streets.  Those people who spend their lives doing things they hate, or just things that they find utterly unfulfilling - if, at the end of their lives, they found a box on the shelf at Wall Mart with all those lost hours back in the prime of their life, how much would they pay for it?  No matter how rich they've gotten, how much would they give back for those lost hours?

Sometimes I feel like I slept through most of my 20s.  My time ain't for sale no more.

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Quatrains by Rumi
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Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running to my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.

In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
and you are that.

But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.
Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

Currently watching : Awakenings Rele