Passion..My Muse..

Many women long to live passionate lives, to be swept away from reality. Usually from a safe distance and in small doses. That's why we are drawn to steamy novels, sobby movies, platonic flirtations, and sometimes even life changing affairs. Passion, after all, means abandoning reason for reckless pleasure...running off with the tall dark handsome playboy instead of washing dishes and cooking dinner.
Passion is wild, chaotic, unpredictable. Permissive. Excessive. Obsessive. Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Passionate women can't help but rejoice in their emotions, celebrate their desires, howl at the moon, act out their fantasies, boil a pet rabbit. It's in their blood.
The rest of us...like me...have real life responsibilities that leave little room (or so I have always thought) for giving in to passionate impulses ~ whether emotional, physical, or financial...dogs to walk, bills to pay, doctors appointments to make, supper to get on the table, households to create and run. There goes a day. There goes a life...and not with a passionate upending bang..but with a quiet uneventful whimper and whine.
What I have failed to realize until now is that passion is the muse of creative authenticity. It's the primordial pulsating energy that infuses my life..that pounds away in my heart and head..that keeps me awake and alive. Passion does not reveal itself only in clandestine, romantic, bodice ripping cliches. Passion is also cloaked in deep, subtle, quiet, committed ways...snuggling with my child, preparing a special meal, capturing a beautiful image on film, following a dream. Every day offers me another opportunity to live a passionate life rather than a passive one. If I will stop denying myself pleasure. If I will learn to say Yes. If, quite simply, I will let go and open up.
Passion is holy. I need to accept that a raging fire burns within me, whether I am comfortable with this truth or not. Passion is a part of the real life package...it is how and why we are created. By love, for love, to love. I am given opportunities to live passionately everyday..to follow my heart...to love without hesitation or question...to create fearlessly and ferociously. I must learn to stop silencing my passions..and instead to give them outward expression. Otherwise I fear my soul will suffer a spontaneous combustion from regret.
The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, and the Jewish Talmud all teach that we will be called to account for every permissible passion and pleasure life offered us but we refused to enjoy while here on Earth. I want my account to be full of passions realized..I want to say that I believed..that I battled...and that I burned through all the passion I was given. Or at least that I boiled a few bunnies.
Dorothy L. Sayers believed that "The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless." I don't know about that..but I promise to find joy in my passions from here on out.

XOX