Our Bowl of Cherries

On the table, standing alone, is a bowl of cherries. Not just any bowl of cherries. This bowl is your life.
You see, life is a bowl of cherries. When we stand back and look at our life, we can see the shape, color, size and texture of the bowl. Inside, the beautiful, slightly round, ripe cherries nestling there. A few stems are still attached. Life is like that. Someone looking at you sees the whole bowl. You must take each cherry, one by one, as a day or just a moment in your life. Each moment is dark red. We pop that moment into our mouth. First discarding the stem as something not needed to send on to our stomach, but each cherry has one. We have to throw it away, it is an unnecessary part. We bite into the moment and as the sweet nectar
flows into our taste buds we come up against a hard unmoving cherry seed. Every cherry has one and every moment has a hard place. We remove this obstacle and finally taste the sweetness that is there in each moment. Gone is the stem which we held to bring the cherry to our mouth. Gone is the seed, an aggravation we have tossed aside. All that remains is the sweetness of each moment that we can savor it as it flows through the mouth and down the throats of our lives. Each moment to be taken by its own sweetness. Alas! In every cherry, to make us appreciate the sweet nectar, there is a little tartness. So you see --- life is a bowl of cherries.

Cliff McDuffie