Yet, what if you were visited by a rude angel who revealed to you how your mind had been usurped: the moments of your day harnessed for agendas not your own; your life had been waylaid by interlopers (e.g., Madison Avenue, family legacies, social pressures) who you do not remember granting entrance into your mind?
'What kind of a tale of horror is this?' you would demand. 'How did it come to this? Angel,' you would cry out, 'What kind of a cruel joke is this? Why me?'
And the angel would simply flash you eternity's impersonal grin and tell you it is not personal. You have done the very human thing of gathering thoughts and beliefs like a bower bird gathers shiny objects. You have mistaken the bauble-stippled nest of found material for the honey-hive of your soul.
In contrast, passion arrives as a surging flood; the caress of silver moonlight on dark water; a golden fire blazing through one's blood. But its purpose does not end there, i.e. in a fleeting incandescence of the soul. The energies of a fast moving wildfire must be transmuted into the persistence inherent to a stalwart heart--the maintenance of an interior hearth.
Those who evince passion will suffer. Worse, those who demur will suffer confinement in a cold, protective lock-up of their own construction. The union of passion and suffering, with much patience and persistence, transforms winged passion into a deep-dwelling compassion. Luminous angels are drawn earthward to weep.
Life beckons, but all too many ignore the call or defer adherence until it is too late. Too often people confuse a sense of purpose with an obsession for seeking safety; they long for purity and fear the sublime awkwardness that allows you to lose your balance and fall into your essential self.
By embodying the latter, you have entered a realm that exist beyond success and failure because when you venture into the heart of creation, you venture deep into your own being. The more passion you evince in life the deeper you inhabit your own humanity.
The only failure in life comes to be when you dismiss destiny's invitation to dance.
The death-besotted, collective psyche of the late capitalist state reveals the consequences of a culture-wide refusal to heed the call.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." -- C.G. Jung
(*The names of the individuals discussed in this article have been altered by the author.)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
