“You've got this life and while you've got it, you'd better kiss like you only have one moment, try to hold someone's hand like you will never get another chance to, look into people's eyes like they're the last you'll ever see, watch someone sleeping like there's no time left, jump if you feel like jumping, run if you feel like running, play music in your head when there is none, and eat cake like it's the only one left in the world!”
C. JoyBell C.
The fictional character attached to 'me' that has been created since birth, has always wished to live a life less ordinary. There has long been twisting, gasping and crying in the struggle to wrench free of the straitjacket of imposed subjectivity. She didn't know that she was already free and always had been. Now that seeing happens, by no-one looking at nothing, any meaning that this being once held to, has evaporated into the vast sky of naked, pure awareness. Like the bride stripped bare of her gown, the naked flesh merges with the other floating atoms in the dark, haunted room where there was once light playing on perceived loved objects that illustrated her story. The text of that life is a palimpsest - offering moment to moment re-writes and erasures, in a game of 'Let's Play at Being Whomever We Want'. Like a child at Christmas who keeps quiet about knowing there is no Santa, the presents are still accepted and enjoyed. The gift of playing at life.
One of these gifts is passion. A life of passion is an embracing of possibility. It is a rejection of the ordinary, the mundane. I have no wish to sacrifice spontaneous passion on the altar of safety and the comfort of routine. Passion for the man I love, for what happens when paint is applied to a surface: the creation of something freshly born. Passion for the natural world of trees and plants, earth and sky, birds, rivers and rocks. Passion is an urgent need to do whatever it is that moves you - whether it is planting a garden, writing a poem, running a marathon, or cooking a meal - it is the juice of life. There is no doer, but much of excitement and joy can be happening. And yes, those feelings are still felt and value judgements are still made. Seeing the fiction of self does not mean that this being should live out her days in a darkened room with no one to love with ardour, nor creative pursuits to colour her world.
Passion in a relationship arises from appreciation, intense seeing of another, and the desire to connect with their being-ness beyond the constraints and perceived limitations of 'personality.' The domesticated human couple celebrating the inherent wild nature, circling each other with sparkling eyes. Kissing and touching as if it might be the last time. Immune to the invention called 'time', lost in the eternity of each enthusiastic moment. Celebrating the connection between you; the sexual energy inspired by that person and the way you entwine as awake beings - united in the seeing in an un-seeing
world.
Seeing the truth about the meaninglessness of existence ideally should not be mutually exclusive with living a colourful life. Life is short and it is up to us to make it sweet.
Floris Arntzenius - Passion, 1892
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- Mountain Daughter
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