Passion Is Sacred

"The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself."

~ Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers

"Imagine it's 30 years from now. You're looking back at the history of your relationship with desire. There was a certain watershed moment when you clearly saw that some of your desires were mediocre, inferior, and wasteful, while others were pure, righteous, and invigorating. Beginning then, you made it a life goal to purge the former and cultivate the latter. Thereafter, you occasionally wandered down dead ends trying to gratify yearnings that weren't worthy of you, but usually you wielded your passions with discrimination, dedicating them to serve the highest and most interesting good."

"Imagine this scene. You're really thirsty -- so dehydrated that you're feeling faint. Yet here's the weird thing: You're walking along the bank of a wide river that's so clear you could see the bottom if you looked. But you're not looking. In fact, you seem oblivious to the surging force of nature just a few yards away.

Is it invisible to you? Are you so preoccupied with your suffering that you're blind to the very source that would end your suffering"

~ Rob Brezsny

The Reader of Signs

“ever tried.
ever failed.
no matter.
try again.
fail again.
fail better.”

~ Samuel Beckett

On December 31, 2014, I was sideswiped by a hit and run driver. I wasn't paying attention. I was too busy reading the signs. He wasn't reading the signs. He aimed straight for me, then swerved at the last moment. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a fatal blow. For the next two weeks I was one of the walking dead. Mortally wounded, completely unaware of my tragic fate. Such a strange word. Fate. But there it is. I'd been frozen in place reading the signs. Portents of what was about to happen, what would happen, no matter how I tried to prevent it. It felt like déjà vu.

It felt fated.

Fate? Souls? Reincarnation? I know how you probably feel about people who use those words. Believe me, I feel the same way most of the time. New age shysters out to sell you something or woefully deluded, albeit well intentioned, tree-hugging busybodies out to save your soul. Oh yes, I was skeptical, cavalier even. I scoffed at the idea. Even Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence seemed too hippie-crystal-metaphysical for my taste. But I am speaking of the soul here. At least, mostly, metaphorically. I'd sustained a mortal wound to my spirit.

He'd dealt the death blow before and would do it again. Will do it again.

It won't kill me. Not exactly. It is a metaphorical death and rebirth. Like the phoenix, I will rise from the ashes and be reborn. Forever changed into something new.

Cut-Up Poem for Johanna's Birthday

Women think
 I had thought in those years, I suppose

But what pain

 I thought now,  to settle upon –

did not hold – that even that was illusory?

some more fantastic and rare dream
having once aspired? ...the most-the best-we can do:


over and over again, in the quiet part of our minds.



* These are Johanna's words, taken from Goodreads quotes from her novels. I just cut them up and rearranged them to create this poem.

Salvation is here and now

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten --
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment
in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

~ Kabir, translated and rendered by Robert Bly

"The Verb to Be"

André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be”

I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the evening on a terrace by the sea. It’s despair and not the return of a quantity of insignificant facts like seeds that leave one furrow for another at nightfall. It’s not the moss that forms on a rock or the foam that rocks in a glass. It’s a boat riddled with snow, if you will, like birds that fall and their blood doesn’t have the slightest thickness. I know the general outline of despair. A very small shape, defined by jewels worn in the hair. That’s despair. A pearl necklace for which no clasp can be found and whose existence can’t even hang by a thread. That’s despair for you. Let’s not go into the rest. Once we begin to despair we don’t stop. I myself despair of the lampshade around four o’clock, I despair of the fan towards midnight, I despair of the cigarette smoked by men on death row. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no heart, my hand always touches breathless despair, the despair whose mirrors never tell us if it’s dead. I live on that despair which enchants me. I love that blue fly which hovers in the sky at the hour when the stars hum. I know the general outline of the despair with long slender surprises, the despair of pride, the despair of anger. I get up every day like everyone else and I stretch my arms against a floral wallpaper. I don’t remember anything and it’s always in despair that I discover the beautiful uprooted trees of night. The air in the room is as beautiful as drumsticks. What weathery weather. I know the general outline of despair. It’s like the curtain’s wind that holds out a helping hand. Can you imagine such a despair? Fire! Ah they’re on their way … Help! Here they come falling down the stairs … And the ads in the newspaper, and the illuminated signs along the canal. Sandpile, beat it, you dirty sandpile! In its general outline despair has no importance. It’s a squad of trees that will eventually make a forest, it’s a squad of stars that will eventually make one less day, it’s a squad of one­-less-­days that will eventually make up my life.

Translated from the French by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow