The ember glowing within is joy in repose awaiting your awareness. It watches you with loving eyes. It does not fear that you will forget your true nature. It knows that you will remember as the ways of the world grow wearisome.
Along the way lie bandits who would steal your love and rob you of your wisdom. Bandits hide in the brambles. They pluck at you like thorns. Do not fall into their clutches. Keep your focus on the ember within. To see the face of joy is to be captured by its beauty. You cannot escape its grace. It descends on you. You are a star plucked from the heavens; a bird taken from the wind. What you once thought was home is a lie.
You have your world of faith, property, and family, but where lies your reality? Within! Your world will collapse back into the dust from which it came, but you are eternal joy. Open the door to your true nature. Do not be locked into the desires of the me of the body. Your expectations will bury you in pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow.
Joy has no opposite. Open to its possibilities. They are endless. Joy finds its way through the gutters of drunkenness or the highest of heavens. Nothing escapes joy. Joy is all.