PASSION BEING BORN

Now entering the forbidden store where my heritage lies concealed

Opening the heart chakra, prying a bit wider every day

Is it OK to let in the light? Wasn't darkness safe, low exposure

So much to find, cluttered in the corners and on the shelves of time

This storage space holds everything there wasn't room for

In all those cramped houses I've lived in over and over again

Trying to fit into one tiny room and another and another

Now imagine mansions, lofts, studios, forest hideaways

All potential alchemical laboratories, never seen before.

Without passion there is no genuine living, just circles caught in circles that never move to the three dimensional level of life. Life moves in spirals rather than in circles.

I’m regaining my passion this year. After a long winter, the ice is breaking and droplets are trickling into promising streams. I didn’t realize how much of the water of life I’d lost over the decades. Such a long time spent just getting by waiting for a chance to live a life placed article by article on a shelf hoping for a better time. It was a lesson in how one can lose one’s soul bit by bit. It seems that birth is a lifelong process carrying us by stages to each new level of life. At any point along the way we can be still born or thrown out on an ice patch. I once saw a cartoon about a hatch-ling proud of itself for making it alive out of its eggshell, but it hadn’t yet noticed that this shell was within a shell that was within another shell ad infinitum.

When I was young I was passionate about everything. However my family was a bit intimidated by my intensity. With the help of Church and School they put a high thick wall around me. After colliding with this wall again and again I gradually I lost hope and almost lost memory of the passion for life. More accurately I hid it. I loved to dance I love to draw and paint, I loved horses and wildness, all things of mystery but these passions were frowned on in our fundamentalist family. I could only watch longingly while admiring others dancing beautifully or taking art lessons. Later I took ballet lessons on my own, learned everything I could about dance, about the forbidden beauty beyond the wall. But I was too old by then to fulfill my dream. Now I see that the enemy was fear of passion and thus fear of life. The most dangerous enemy always masquerades as a friend.

My real problem with my  original people was that they had totally lost their passion for life. Although they loved me they no longer had enough life force left beyond everyday tasks to involve themselves in my interests or take my dreams and talents seriously. They wanted me to fit in, be invisible, be responsible but not dangerously responsive. They were happy to settle with just getting by. Even my low grades in school were virtually ignored. I know now that they expected that I would become honest, humble, and expect very little from life. I would graduate from High School marry a good Christian man and work as a housekeeper or receptionist. My school was in a low-income neighborhood. I realized much later that our school had teachers that were culled out of better schools and had lost their passion or never found it.

People are motivated by emotion not reason. Even reasonable arguments are designed to promote emotional responses even if in the defeated emotion of fear. Without passion nothing happens. Without passion everything that seems to happen is just a smoke screen to keep us from discovering or connecting with a passion that might make us awake from our zombie state and join in creation. Passion is necessary for a genuine connection with our Source. Without passion there is no life only pseudo life.