PASSION

PASSION

June 23, 2019

You can still write the book even if nobody reads it. Learn it if you don’t know what to do. You have to be willing to open and learn.

“Purpose is the reason you journey. Passion is the fire that lights the way”.   Anon

“When your passion and purpose are greater than your fears and excuse, you will find a way.” 

“No alarm clock needed. My passion wakes me”. Eric Thomas

P.A.S.S.I.O.N

Powerful

Acknowledged

Strength

 supported

Inside

Our

Necessity

This beautiful and amazing poem is from the book:

I Will Not Die an Unlived Life- by Dawna Markova

I’ve also included some excerpts from the book that will give you a wonderful way to look at yourself and the gift of being ALIVE. Passion helps us to feel our aliveness.

I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
Of falling or catching fire
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open wide to me,
to make me less afraid
more accessible
to loosen my heart
Until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
Goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom
goes on as fruit

DAWNA MARKOVA: The Seasons of Renewal: A living Landscape

There’s no part of creation that does not go through a cycle of growth, falling away, disappearing and reemerging. Think of a tree. Or the moon. Why should humans be the one aspect of life that is exempt from this cycle? Our pulse beats in varying rhythms, as all of nature’s does. Why then do we move at only two speeds, fast or inert?

What if we thought of ourselves like the moon and had equal faith in what is ready to fade away and what’s invisible as we do in what is shining?  What if we could easily shed the unknown and habitual ways, we think of ourselves in order to foster the things within that are in seed from and dormant? What if you gave yourself 3 days a month or 3 hours a day to allow everything you know about yourself to disappear, instead of assuming you are falling apart or clinically depressed?  What if you broke through your mundane level of thinking and nested yourself in rich, dark, regenerative soil, where you could be engaged in innocent inquiry with who you are and what you are becoming?

Most of us and our organizations still follow the old mythology, where we are thought of as perpetual motion machines, working at one speed, fast as can be, productive as possible-like stair climbers in a gym, up, up, up, asking us to exert more effort but getting nowhere quickly. Ascent, ascent, higher and higher. Never dormant, never darkness or a plateau for regeneration.

As a consequence, we become imprisoned in our own rigidities. What if, instead, we realized like Ram Dass, that we go through many incarnations in this one life?  What if we realized that instead of “Things” getting better and better if we work harder and harder, like a seed, we will each in our own rhythm go through endless cycles of gestation, birth, growth, death and renewal?

Like the rest of the natural world, human beings go through seasons. At one point, we are in the full bloom of summer, harvesting, committed, in abundance. Then naturally, there is an autumnal time of falling away, disillusionment, stagnation, a shedding of what has been used up.  Then must come the fallowness and dormancy of winter, death, rest.  Eventually, as it is happening right outside of our windows of this cabin, there is a great melting into muck, and mud, which, if one can persevere, opens naturally into an abundant yellow-green time, when everything is possible and horizons open. Consider your own passion for a moment. Is it hiding under the softest fall of snow, or going through a raw shedding? And is your sense of purpose trembling with Spring green or Flaming full harvest?

Think of yourself as a gardener. You have been given some seeds. You don’t actually grow them. You merely provide the conditions in which they can thrive, and then tend them with curiosity and kindness as they grow themselves. You don’t explain to the apple tree that it shouldn’t be shedding leaves now. Or that it should be producing pears instead, or that its flowers are excessive for the amount of fruit necessary for regeneration. A gardener cultivates a tree by acting on its essential behalf, by making sure it has the necessary spaciousness and support to fin opportunities for growth in both darkness and light.

I don’t believe our existence in this world is a random accident. Maybe it is, but I don’t believe it. I believe there is more to life that living each day as it comes. The great Cellist Pablo Casals agreed. He said that through the whole of recorded history there has never been another such as you. Each of us is a miracle of uniqueness. Each of us, therefore, is responsible for the discovery of our sustain passions and rhythms, the cultivation of the green fields in which we can discover what keeps us connected to the full fertility of our soul and all it has to give to the world.

Let us swing wide all the doors and window
of our hearts on their rusty hinges

Let us see the light in the other and honor it
so we may lift one another on our shoulders
and carry each other along

Let holiness move in us
so we may pay attention to its small voice
and give ourselves fully with both hands
                                    Dawna Markova