Tag Archives: passion

Returning to you . . .

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Why does it take time to become a child again in seeing and playing? Why should it take years before you go forth without protection, to know you are safe in yourself?

. . . . .

It has been eight, nine, maybe even ten months since I have written. A lot has happened in the world. It has been confirmed repeatedly that the president of the United States is a dangerous ego-maniac and compulsive liar. Also, he is stupid in the way that narcissists know nothing except their delusions, impulses, and desires. Narcissism always catches up with you and is guaranteed to turn you into a toxic slab without the means or impulse to help other human beings.

So, we are left less than leaderless during a crisis. We have to work our way around a dangerous obstacle in the way of our care and the care of others.

I write this in a semi-sequestered state as someone well over the age of 60, which seems to be the assumed age where you start disintegrating and where, if you get Covid-19, your life could be considerably shorter than you anticipated–precious years you planned to watch your grandchildren grow into young adults, to publish the book in residence in your mind, maybe even go on a trek to Nepal or a walk in the African bush. Maybe, we think, there is still time to become wiser and do last forgivenesses.

Perhaps the musing of this writing is to say, most of us resent having time taken from us by trivia or mistakes. Most of us? Perhaps we have differing definitions of trivia. Perhaps fewer definitions of mistakes. Trump is a mistake.

My definition of trivia is anything that repeats itself in banality. Flowers could repeat themselves infinitely and never be banal. Plastic wrap is banal.

Let’s get right down to it. Humans are not good at earth management. We tend to break things, crush things, shame each other and ourselves, have tirades, destroy beauty, and discount our senses. Well, we kill each other and other living creatures and plants is what it comes down to.

Now we are in a real crisis and I am semi-sequestered. Surely you are too, and we fear our time to get it right is shortening.

So I’ve decided to love in an undisciplined way, and I bring up memories of how I felt in my 30s. How I felt in my body, how I ran and whirled, how I sang, and still had body hair. But you know what? There is an even greater sensitivity and increase of pleasure now in observing what is around me–truly tasting, basking in sunsets, feeling nuances of poetry, seeing the smallest living miracles surrounding me.

Now I have a bird feeder, bird bath, and bee and butterfly patches in my garden. It is important to lure the birds, bees, and butterflies back. Each is a revelation. Tell me again how feathers and wings came to be!

I taste fine wine in my mouth by simply imagining it. I see colors across the room through my mind. Lime green, fuchsia, mustard, cyan, teal … Ah, they flash before me now.

Can one explain these things to others? I think not, but perhaps the joys of them can infuse me and be shared simply through my being. Yours, too.

Why does it take time to become a child again in seeing and playing? Why should it take years before you go forth without protection, to know you are safe in yourself?

Why did we have to miss so many years getting here?

Yes, I am aware I am jumping from subject to subject but you need to keep up. If I am indecipherable, it is not a fault. Don’t think I am blathering, because I am not. Pay attention.


Passion, a steed

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You can lead passion to rationality
but you can’t make it drink.

It may bow its head or rear up, meow or whinny,
but it will not drink.

The size of its obstinance does not matter.
Passion, any size, does not drink rationality.

We brush our teeth and tie our shoes, it does not.
We read our mail and change our beds, it does not.
We pay our bills and make coffee, it does not.

Passion drives us mad banging against the bars
and searching for the key to escape.

Passion rode us on its back long ago, or only yesterday.

It remembers, and will not let us forget.

Wonder Woman Ballet: whence cometh God?

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In the tension between astringent mind and sloppy emotion, I am landing in the slipshod stuff of emotion. That is my selected connection to God – and don’t we all want to be connected to God, don’t we all intuit “home” and miss it?

The poet Jane Hirshfield – we used to be email friends many years ago – called simultaneously seeing and living in both mind and emotion as “double vision,” feeling passion and remaining dispassionate at the same time. She followed Zen and pulls you into the life of a tree or a rabbit or a dog or a jar of jam as though it is the story of all existence right there right then. But it makes me ache, that discipline. I want more. I want to dance and know not that I’m in the thrall of what’s around me but that I am disturbing that thrall. I dance therefore I am.

Wonder Woman, scooter, girl, costume

Wonder Woman on a scooter:
“I’m flying!”

There is nothing like the juxtaposition of the sense of being surrounded by the just-released dancing spirit of your just-deceased (and until then rule-bound) mother and seeing your 4-year-old granddaughter dance her “Wonder Woman Ballet” to understand that there are “more things in heaven and earth, . . .” and so forth than analytical understanding. There is STUFF. There are banana peels to slip on and finger cuts in the kitchen and lost mittens and weather that slams you one way or another. There is love and passion and desire that make you salivate. Your body knows.

And I will meditate, I will take that up again. Heaven knows, my body knows that my mind is cluttered to overflowing, that my dreams are so filled with Bosch-esque images of sight and sound and touch, both good and bad, that no storyline has any hope of shining through, no dream messages have a chance to guide me. Sleep is still assigned as cleaner-upper – which is vital, but meditation is too. When was my mind last clear of want and need and habits and ruts and patterns?  When was my mind empty and light as the air under a bird’s wings?

Yes, I know that being inside passion and being outside as observer contradict. I know that an empty mind is also a portal to the Greater Essence, the thing I’m trying to evoke in my garden where I planted nearly 100 iris bulbs this fall on the theory that gardens are poetry overlaid on Source Emptiness.

Yes, I know that mind stillness and emotions have both separately been embraced as being with God. You do understand here that I’m not even vaguely talking of the costumed creature that religions call God, don’t you?

And don’t talk to me about mind-body balance. Got that half a lifetime ago.

Because there is dancing, wildly without form, that is sometimes called for. Don’t talk to me about Bach and mathematical relationships, not even the Golden Mean. Because there are also supernovas and black holes and the touch of a rose petal and their math is beyond calculation.

Surely my body is fighting now to escape death, to grab the life left of a person with no parents left. Surely that is true. Surely it wants to escape a death of my spirit before the death of itself. Surely that, too, is true. And that involves passion, large passion even about small things.

The intent is not to go splat, I am not self-destructive. The intent is to survive the super-reality that being alive is such a large thing that we all always filter it into bits and pieces so we can have the safety of the illusion that we understand or manipulate our life. If we hear only one note of the symphony, we can feel master of it, fools that we are.

How much energy, how much electricity bursts one’s cells, overcomes one’s rational mind? How much? I have no illusion that I can process the whole symphony, but maybe instead of one note or one instrument I can gain a passage, a measure or two, the high notes of the flute or the vibrations of the cello. Or with luck and trying and persistence maybe sometimes both at once . . .

. . . because that is what processing pain and loss and birth and creation and living here in bodies is about. We cannot know the whole symphony until we can hear more than one thing at a time . . . and somewhere in there passion rises not because we start to understand but because we begin to feel. I trust this impulse even though I feel it could burst open my mind into the terrifying nothingness of salvation.