Innocence means expecting nothing, enjoying the unexpected, taking delight in surprise.
Innocence does not have an object in mind. Innocence doesn’t know disappointment because innocence has no agenda. Innocence laughs and claps hands.
It is not that innocence anticipates joy at every moment. Innocence is spontaneous and cannot be planned. Innocence is taken with the joy of life as it appears when it appears. Innocence takes delight. Delight by design palls next to delight by innocence.
No matter how many times you play peek-a-boo with a baby, the baby takes delight. The baby does not think: “I will take delight.” The baby is simply delighted. Every time the game is new, and every time the game engenders delight. The game does not manufacture delight. Delight arises.
If you did not hark to the past or hark to the future, delight would be commonplace, and yet it would still be delight.
It may have been forgotten that life on Earth is meant to be filled with delight.
If judgment did not exist, life would be delight after delight. Your life would be delight after delight. Without judgment, life would arrive, and life would be greeted as the unfolding that it is.
Open up life, beloveds. Take life by the hand and usher it in as you would a wealthy guest. Take delight in the guest of life even when it is poor, even when life, as you see it, is a thief or a beggar, seemingly wanting to take from you.
Even so, life is a boon, and it is better to welcome life than to decry it.
Even tears can be innocent. They come of their own accord the same way that laughter comes. Your shoulders shake with tears much as they do with laughter. Sobs of laughter and tears of joy also exist and extend themselves to you.
You interpret occasions for woe. It may well be that you underestimate happiness and make too much of woe. Woe is a sorry thing. Alas, there is woe in the mind of man. That which does not exist exists in the mind of man.
You are an experiencer of life as it appears in its many guises, yet life is only life. However it announces itself, life presents itself to you. Life is not to escape from.
Life on Earth has been described as a forest so thick that the sun and the moon are hidden from view. And yet forests lead to the glade, and forests lead to the Ocean. Before you go through the forest, the forest looms large. Once you have passed through the forest and reached the glade and the ensuing Ocean, the forest has lost its darkness. What seemed large and dark no longer is. And so you walk through life and keep your step lively for there is new sunlight straight ahead.
Leap in life, and be blessed.
Life on Earth is a blessed interlude. Don’t pass life by. Do not wrestle with life, yet wrest all the joy there is. There is always the other side of every coin. Leave judgment out of the picture, for judgment is a dark crayon that colors over all the other colors. Choose light colors. Take what is your share of life, invited or not, and come out as innocent as when you entered.
It is for you to welcome life and not try to prevent it. You are here for joy and not woe. Woe is a lesser choice. Accept what life brings and do not call life woe or anything but the gift it is.