I try to read this poem every day while fasting… to help with my resistance…

JOY of FASTING by Rumi

There’s a hidden sweetness
in the stomach’s emptiness.

We are lutes, no more, no less.
If the sound box is stuffed
full of anything, no music.

If the brain and the belly
are burning clean with fasting,
every moment a new song
comes out of the fire.

The fog clears, and a new
energy makes you run up the
steps in front of you.

Be emptier and cry like
reed instruments cry.
Emptier, write secrets with
the reed pen.

When you’re full of food and drink,
Satan sits where your
spirit should, an ugly metal
statue in place of the Kaaba.

When you fast, good habits gather
like friends who want to help.

Fasting is Solomon’s ring.
Don’t give it to some illusion
and lose your power.

But even if you’ve lost all
will and control, they come
back when you fast,
like soldiers appearing out
of the ground, pennants
flying above them.

A table descends to your
tent, Jesus’s table.
Expect to see it, when you
fast, this table spread with
other food better than the
broth of cabbages.

I seem to have a love/resistance with fasting. Love for the emptiness I feel… craving for wanting to eat everything in sight. Especially when I smell food or even hear the clink of dishes. When I am fatigued or upset or overwhelmed I want to put something in my mouth.

I pray for help… for something to enlighten me. Then the word Fast pops in my mind. I fear this word… I resist this process. Yet I see the benefits (good habits that can be formed). How our thoughts and ego overtake us and lull us into compliance.

I want to take back my life not be at the beck and call of food. Or diabetes or kidney failure.

–Nicole

P.S. Day 6 of fast: feelings of being overwhelmed, fatigued, some bowel irritation, headache, infection in foot which has hurt for months feels great, no urine. Blood sugars a lot lower and only took about 1 unit for corrections; but I took 2 units of Tresiba (1 unit in the morning and then again in the evening). That evening unit was a mistake and went low but seem to be stable now.

P.P.S. I dislike taking glucose tablets when I am eating. When fasting even more – I feel like a failure that I had to take them. This sums up my feeling of having diabetes: a failure as a human being. As a child receiving this diagnosis you think it is you fault. Another blogpost I may have to write.😉