MY BUSINESS IS TO BURN

Apprenticeship to Love: The crooked path of sacred marriage (edited June 21, 2026; originally published June 10, 2022)

TODAY'S QUESTION

What is your initial response to the burn of life —to a set back, an obstacle, something that seems to be what you don't want in this moment? Do you worry or feel like giving up? Do you feel a fire within you to push back?

TODAY’S MEDITATION

This fire. Her testing. Even in the benevolence of this life and this love, I feel it: the burn of opening to receive beyond myself.

I am becoming acutely aware of this: I am strong enough.

I am strong enough to feel my tenderness.

I am strong enough to allow this life burn me.

I am strong enough to allow this love to burn me.

I am strong enough to sacrifice myself, that I may become more than myself —to become the man my beloved knows me to be.

...

I stand at the edge of this fire of love. I feel its heat, and I choose to step forward closer, leaning into the burn, the tenderness. I am following her intuition.

Her tenderness is an extension of my own feeling, my own nervous system.

Her tenderness and her dark unknown is like an oracle, leading me with mystery to this willingness to sacrifice myself, my notion of who I am as a man. It is a moment of ashes —and more. All of it beyond my imagining…

...

Today I stoke this fire. Today I welcome this testing. Today I burn with determination—and joy!

...

What comes next?

I don't know.

I am beginning to understand that I don't need to know. I am beginning to know that "the future," what comes next, it is none of my business.

What is my business? To prepare myself to sacrifice myself in the fire of this moment.

To breathe, deeply. To feel deeply, and to follow her tenderness and burn away all resistance to what she brings me.

What is my business? To enjoy this burning!

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Thus it was that older cultures widely believed—or should I say widely recognized—that the degradation and abandonment of their rituals portended the End of the World. .…The question of what we want to become may be premature, because our wanting bears the indelible tint of the delusions of our age. It is more a matter of listening for what we are to become. (Charles Eisenstein)

🌀.…you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

🌀When you anchor your attention in the vast, timeless emptiness from which it is sourced, She (the deep pulse of feminine life-love energy) is invited to reveal and express Herself most fully. (Nina Lombardo)

🌀You are not like that now. (My beloved, my oracle, my siren)

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