PASSION BEING BORN

I’ve been thinking about the power of emotion and its most intense expression, passion. Without passion there is no vitality and creativity, only circles caught in circles that never move out of two dimensions into the three dimensional world of life or beyond. Creative life moves in spirals rather than in circles.  Passion is emotion focused on something we find central to our very being.

Creative Burst

I feel that my own passion is returning.  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 while waiting for a chance to live the life placed piece by piece on a shelf for a better time.  It was a lesson in how one can lose one’s soul bit by bit.

In a sense, birth is a lifelong process carrying us by stages to each new dimension of life.  At any point along the way we can be still born or thrown onto an ice patch. I once saw a cartoon about a hatchling proud of itself for making it alive out of its eggshell, but it hadn’t yet noticed that this shell was enclosed within a shell that was enclosed within another shell ad infinitum.

When I was younger I was passionate about everything. However my family was a bit intimidated by my intensity.  With the help of Church and School they put up a high dense wall. 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 and I loved horses and wilderness 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 and learned everything I could about dance.  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 enemies always masquerade as friends.

The frustration of my early years was that my people had 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.  Their world was two-dimensional. They wanted me to fit in, be responsible but not dangerously responsive.   They were OK 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. I was passionately, intensely interested in many things and my school was in a low-income neighborhood.  I realized much later that the teachers in my school were culled from better schools and had lost their passion or never found it. Most of them merely went through the motions while waiting for retirement or a husband to rescue them.

People are motivated by emotion not reason.  Even reasonable arguments are designed to promote emotional attachments although sometimes the emotion is hatred or 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 wake from our zombie state and join in creation. Passion is necessary for a genuine connection with our Source. Passion is life force directed like a laser.

Emotion drives all human and animal actions.  Of course not all emotions are for good, but no emotion is certainly not good. It is a sign of death.  We don’t necessarily die all at once.  Sometimes it’s a piece by piece process until we lose the last sparks of heat and light and become gray and cold like ash.