The passion of our lives

I am thinking about Passion this morning and what fills the nooks and crannies of our souls with delight.  What are we doing right now that ignites the fire of passion within us?  What sparks our joy, our excitement, our smile of delight for what's blossoming in this strange and confusing and beautiful world?

Someone, perhaps Emma on Facebook (for those of you who remember EmmaTree from here on Gaia) posited the question recently, something like "Tell me something that matters to you or excites you." For some odd reason, after she asked that question, nothing sizzled up to the surface in my life.  Excitement?  Hmmm...  Maybe going to NYC last week? Seeing my daughter?  Watching spring flowers bloom?  Splitting firewood? (nahhh, not really!  at least the firewood part of it. The NYC trip, my daughter & the flowers qualify, though.)

Yesterday our Artist's Way group met in our living room, moving deep into sharing the way we resist our passion and creativity, the way we sometimes avoid, turn away or block our creative streams.  Suddenly, the passion which has sustained me for so many years consolidated crystal clear and I realized:  I love words.  I love the way words dance together, the way they marry, the way they dive in the creek and splash in the cold waters of the stream, breathless.  Just watching that sentence appear filled my whole being with heart-pumping joy. 

Words sing cantatas in my cells, trapeze from the third eye down into the solar plexus, waltz with shy does under a full midnight May moon.  Words sizzle the stars.  They blossom. They wither.  They grow wrinkled and wise or soft and gentle as milky babies breath. 

They're magic to me.  And they've been that way since age nine, sitting before that old Underwood typewriter in my bedroom, pushing down the stiff keys with unpracticed fingers, filled with disbelief the way the words etched in smudged black-and-white and created the heavens.  The words provided a back alley to God. 

Don't get me wrong.  I love viewing photography, art, visual media.  Listening to songs, music, rhythm.  Especially merging into those that gesture toward that same passion, that igniting of feelings... Art in its many-bursting colors can burst our doors wide open, so that hummingbirds dart in the living room, circle around our heads and buzz outside again.  

So may I ask any of you who care to share:  What ignites your passion?  What do you do in your life that starts the juices flowing, the heart pitter-pattering, the smile gladdening?  (and it can be a little thing, a simple thing, a small shard of a shell of passion or a big grinning sun in the bright blue sky...)  **And if Siona has already asked this question, which she probably has, substitute "What's Your Passion TODAY?" because each day's passion might taste of a different wild tea, a frothy latte, a luscious raspberry pie.