It is cold. Frigid. Alienating, isolating, brilliant and sharp. Sharp, as in the kind of cold that burns and cuts you. It is hard to move through cold. Hard to move oneself out of bed, somedays. It is hard to step up and do the things you need to do.

What we need, I decided, is a practice to embody this. A practice that can acknowledge the sharp hardness but somehow make it useful. Cultivate fire, melt with compassion, glow the hard edges of 'reality' down to a level of usefulness and wisdom.

There is a way of seeing things as they are, of 'accepting reality' that results in bitterness, cynicism, judgement and sarcasm. This is one version of truth.

But there is also truth made into wisdom: truth that presses hardness into diamonds and moves beyond sarcasm into kindness. It is a soul's journey from 'knowledge' into 'wisdom', a psychiatric path from neurosis into sanity.

There is a sanskrit word, Vajra, which I think means what I mean right now. Literally, diamond. It is a way of seeing and being that sees things as they are, rather than seeing things through the ego. It is the ego, the selfishness, the fearbound, that makes 'reality' and our ideas of it opinionated, judgmental, sarcastic, cynics burned down to spit and hissing. The challenge, the path, is to pierce through the fear of intimacy and embody tenderness through being vulnerable and open. The movement from the intellectual, cold, reasoning doubt in the head to the clear sighted, vulnerable warrior of the heart. The challenge is, as always, to stop living life from the head, and to live from the heart.

Vajra, like a diamond, can be used to cut. But nothing can cut it or break it. It is vajra that will give us the ability to see through and cut away from old paradigms that don't work any longer, to step away from old behaviors and old relationships that have limited or caused us harm. It is the ability to cut oneself free from resentments, old bitterness, antiquated modes of thinking that end up in prejudice, anger, resentment, smallness, fear. Vajra is the diamond strength that can cut through the legacies of pain and open us to the strength of vulnerability and heartfulness. It cuts new paths. For ourselves, for our children. For our new day, today.

Coldness, bitterness, anger, fear: all these darknesses that seem, at first blush, to be endings. That seem so caustic and deadended.

They prove, if we enter them honestly, to be catalysts and shining shimmery things. They prove to be the opportunities we have been praying, or wishing, or waiting for. Don't disparage opportunity because it doesn't look like a pony with a ribbon around its neck, or a lover the way you imagined him all rescue and romance. Sometimes, opportunity is a really fucking cold weekend you have to spend in doors.

Opportunity is what you do with it.