So Many Passions

What does Passion mean to you? 

For the first half of my life I thought Passion was that feeling derived from sex and love. BTW this is also the time I thought sex & love were the same thing. 

Passion was that fleeting thing that waxed and waned according to life's circumstance. It conjured up images of operatic gestures and storylines about extreme choices made in sudden fits of itself.

But in more recent days I am coming to know a different kind of Passion. A more soulful call from deep within that is not sudden or fitful but gradual and steady. It calls to me when I seek it. It patiently waits on me to pick up it's trail. It is not dependent on conditions. It existed then, exists now and will always exist. This kind of uninterrupted Passion shows me the way.

Are these two branches from the same tree? Are they siblings, cousins or ancient ancestors? No I don't think so, their effects are both a call to action, but their way of doing things are so completely different.

Perhaps they overlap eachother like my younger and now older selves. Or perhaps they are companions which simultaneously inform each other like surf and shore? 

I can see conditional Passion's irregular waves roaring and breaking toward land creating an ever changing line on top of the shore. It alternates between exposing and covering up that other species of Passion, the unfluctuating one. Whether seen or unseen, unconditional Passion is like all shores everywhere - unceasingly directional, timeless and forever joining land to sea.

I love this place were the land and sea meet. I am fixed by it's constantly changing and changeless nature. It is here at the shore's edge we are able to see all the possibilities of becoming our truest selves. It is here where choice and moment meet and I become awake. 

I am grateful to be able to recognize this enduring flow of things and to periodically live in my own becoming.

How do you experience Passion?

Tag You're It!

Like Walking on the Moon!

Love is a many splendid thing, but it is NOT something concrete -  nor is Will, Reason or Imagination. Yet we've all experienced these insubstantial (yet very foundational) things. 

We've all felt love for a person, place or thing. We've all willed ourselves out of bed. And we're always Reasoning... "Is it better to do thing A or thing B?"

In general, none of these intangibles can be weighed on a scale, held in our hands or seen with our eyes. But they are no less real than the frozen tundra of Greenland, a fig leaf or the elephant in the room. I am sure you get the picture - right? 

Yet because they are unseen they always seem to be neglected. There just never is a good time to examine the weight of them on our lives. Or the unlimited possibilities of holding them in our consciousness. Or to experiment with them to see how they can help us manifest a better life for ourselves.

For me, when I caught wind that I could intentionally make muscular my ability to see and fortify Love or Intuition -- insert your desired intangible here -- it felt exactly like walking on the moon! What a strange and beautiful place to be, but how do I navigate? At first, in this unfamiliar place I was unable to grasp things with my goofy large gloves and only able to breath from my own limited supply of recirculated air. And I was sure the tank would run out sooner or later. Then I started to take a walk out into the unknown.

Now, after some time playing with these ideas, the gloves have come off. I am untethered! I am examining "the thing" I want from every angle. How do I feel about it? What do I believe. Why do I believe what I believe? Is this belief of mine really true? 

This helps me form a clearer picture of what I want and what I do not want. And from this place IT IS EASY to hold in my consciousness exactly the effect I want to show up in my life. And damn it if I don't see real evidence of my most heartfelt desires right in front of these new eyes of mine. They may not be in the form, color or shape I pictured but they are just what I ordered! 

The trick I found was in not planning how, but just holding the result in mind and more importantly feeling how I would feel when my intangible showed up. Then, having refined it, just let it go.

This takes some practice. I've had to renegotiate within a different gravitational pull. But now -that I sort of have the hang of it - the air is less rare and my tank is always full!

What new thing will you try today?

Tag You're It!

Creating From Wholeness

"I am going to tell a story with great meaning. I am going to make you cry, then make you laugh." 

~ me to myself after dreaming strange things.

In my past I have created things (comedy, paintings, writing... even relationships) from a hungry place so I could feel worthy. Creation to fill emptiness, though still good stuff, is weighted down and stained. It is like taking a breath that is less than full with lungs hobbled by years of tobacco smoke. 

What would it be like to create from a different place - a clearer space - a place that was not so stained? 

What would it be like to be free of this addiction, this need to fill an emptiness, to get love, to feel OK? What would it feel like to create from a pure place of being?

I want to create from this space of already knowing I am loved, already knowing I am worthy, already knowing I am whole. I wonder what those creations will look like? I wonder if they will be different?  And I wonder what that would feel like? I wonder when the screen of broken-ness is removed from my imagination would there be more clarity, more joy, more flow - more art?

I wonder how is this done? 

Here is one idea...

"Very closely allied to the intuition is the faculty of imagination. This does not mean mere fancies, which we dismiss without further consideration, but our power of forming mental images upon which we dwell. These form a nucleus which, on its own plane, calls into action the universal Law of Attraction, thus giving rise to the principle of Growth. 

The relation of the intuition to the imagination is that the intuition grasps an idea from the Great Universal Mind, in which all things subsist as potentials, and presents it to the imagination in its essence rather than in a definite form. And then our image-building faculty gives it a clear and definite form which it presents before the mental vision, and which we then vivify by letting our thought dwell upon it, thus infusing our own personality into it. So providing that personal element through which the specific action of the universal law relative to the particular individual always takes place." ~ Thomas Troward

Dude - why to manifest!

What kinds of things do you wonder? Do you wonder things?

Tag You're It!

A Healing Effect

"For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them."  ~ thich nhat hahn

Describing a feeling is never easy unless I have an acute sense of it's components. I have been living under an umbrella of grief for 23 months now so I can describe that pretty dog gone well...and I think I have. 

Over time I have developed tools, tricks and strategies to dodge, absorb and release much sorrow. But now - today and for the past several days - there is something new afoot. 

There is a freshly burning thing wanting to be revealed. It appears to be a calming answer to an earlier request. And I 'think' I am more grounded and whole because of it. Only time will tell if there is Truth here.

What seems to be building round the middle of my chest is a broad and natural heat, the likes of which one expects to find at the center of a heap of long composted garden waste. Yet this triple shredded compost is inside of me! This may sound strange but it is almost like a space has been made clear "for my husband" inside of my heart. We are connected together again in a new and profound way.

Am I receiving a gift of sorts? Or do I just have indigestion? 

It appears to be the antithesis of those irregular intense strikes of pain and loss. Yes - this feels of steadiness and comfort and love. It is as if by allowing Michael to become part of me - part of my heart - I am made more than whole.

Does any of this make any sense? How can one be more than whole? Is this kind of equation (100% + 1) even possible? The effect of being stretched beyond my current understanding is a feeling of empowerment, compassion and humility for it all.

The one familiar aspect of this new found formation within is finding myself in yet-another-transitional-place. Change has become quite normal to me. In fact it has become standard operating procedure!

As any good Buddhist will tell you, the only way to find permanent joy is by embracing the fact that nothing is permanent. And though I am not Buddhist, experience has shown me this is, ironically, the UNCHANGING Truth. 

This is all I am allowed to know at this time. When I know more I will be sure to tell you. For it is "the telling" that has become my healing. 

And I am hopeful, too, that there are healings in these writings of mine for others. For this is my task. And for this task my gratitude is unbounded.

How are you changing today?

Tag You're It!

Requesting Relief

Loving someone is neither 'a trap' nor 'the answer.' It is a connection to Love. This truth allows for expansion of giving & receiving. Knowing this truth is a gift of great freedom and joy!

Struggling to stay content with all the great and wonderful aspects of the life I am living I am arrived at a crossroads. I am needing relief from paralyzing desire.

This desire is for a person, but it could just as easily be for anything that is unattainable or beyond your control. 

Desire is a sticky place. It will not let me go. I am caught up in a thicket of confusing old thoughts, feelings and experiences. They bind me tightly to the past and do not let me move on. 

I find this condition showing up again and again. And I chaff at how easily it quickens and absorbs all of my attention. The momentary elation I feel when I willingly climb back into this space is scarred by the truth of the thing.

It is from within this space of inner controversy - because I cannot have what I want - that I request some relief.

And I am, as usual, given what I ask for as I have asked from a place of acceptance and love.

Loving someone is neither 'a trap' nor 'the answer.' It is a connection to Love. This truth allows for expansion of giving & receiving. Knowing this truth is a gift of great freedom and joy!

Full Engagement

Peacocks of Chatham County, 21" x 27" Watercolor

There is a way to manufacture a life so it sits up straight and eats it's vegetables, but I want more. There is a way to place yourself on a positive path by counting your blessings and recognizing the good things that are right in front of your nose, but I want more. 

I want to be engaged! 

"Engagement" is a word bandied about in the Social Media Basics for Business class I am currently taking. The class is full of terrifically warm and passionate people looking to learn how to tame or at least ride this phantasmal beast. But I am not sure full engagement can be found on the Internet. On social media Engagement is quixotic currency, defined differently by each platform sometimes open sometimes not, used to propel your carefully (or not so carefully) curated presence outward into the matrix. Engagement here is a calculus, an algorithm -  a game of numbers distilled from SQL code and CRM customer relationship management.

And I know it is not fair to compare business intentions with more soulful intentions, but who said life was fair?

I want to be fully engaged.

I want to be IN LIFE, feeling it's pulse and riding it's waves with full and complete knowing. I want to employ all of my senses - those five we learn about in grade school that allow us to take in all things material. And those six more subtler senses of will, reason, perception, memory, imagination and intuition - which are scarcely recognized, much less developed in these here United States. 

All these resources, tangible or not, are ripe and ready and always available. And they are FREE. All we have to pay is our attention.

I want these sensibilities to place me in that time and space called NOW. And I want NOW's electric energy - with all it's unlimited possibilities - to see my soul through toward loving and expressing and learning and serving.

Is this too much to ask?

Tag You're It!