There is life in passion; breathing, sensing, alive... life. Passion forms, fills and renews it. When passion goes away, the thing dies. A lonely mess of emotion, depressed in its dark chamber, hidden from the light of human laughter and touch, cold and forlorn it slowly dies. We feel its death creeping in, yet we do nothing to stop it. People continue in their routines, their schedules and though those around them can sense the change, they bumble on as if the world was oblivious to the hurt of the dying creature they held jailed within themselves. And then suddenly, they wake or they look up in nervous apprehension and realize that it has died entirely, that it’s sad heart no longer beats to the slow rhythm and the thing that was created by them has been destroyed by them. Knowing irrevocably that this event has happened without ability to be reversed, the people sink into unknown depression, investing in pills to balance chemicals set off in their bodies and in counselors that poke and pry seeking an answer to their client’s sudden drowning emotions. Bring in the cover-ups, the theories, the resolutions and the solutions to medicate this person who has let the love in them die knowingly, thinking all along that once it finally did pass, their lives would be better for it.
Thinking without emotion is dangerous as is the reverse. There exists fear in releasing passion, though; fear that has been placed within people from the dawn of religion. Fear that replaces nature is a cell for our spirits to reside in hell on earth. Fear is a disease that eats away our faces, our bodies, our lives one day at a time. Fear that we will be punished for allowing the creature to die that was whole and pure within us. Fear that we are not good enough to exist without the creature, without the passion that formed it, as well as fear that we can not exist with it either. And the youth see us, adults, walking around like robots in people clothes, wearing masks to cover our shame of murdering passion and life for the sake of money and success and then turning, like villains, to teach them to follow our paths to destruction and they scream out NO! And they twist and turn in nightmares in their beds afraid of the very chains that hold us to our losses and that we securely lock each and every day and they wake sweating, one foot already on the floor and running out of the house on the hill and through the white gate at the end of the cement drive to a better life far away without rules or regulations or imprisonment. And along the way, they sing and they chant and they play the electric guitar and beat the drums, spiking their hair and shooting up their middle fingers at civilization in an attempt to say “No, we don’t want your life. WE WANT TO LIVE!” And so the grown generation closes their window shades and sits down in the recliner to numb their minds with the constant drone of advertisers and marketing propaganda blaring out of boxes in living rooms, becoming obese and investing more money into doctors and pills and counselors to treat the depression that comes from lack of self image; keeping the passionate creature away at all costs; blaming the passion for their self degradation, getting angrier each day until frown lines become facial characteristics.
And the wheels turn in the country, everyone cries out for change, yet we only see more and more sadness as regulation destroys enthusiasm. And someone said to me that I make it seem so simple. And I wondered why it ever needed to be more. We were born with all that we need, whatever made us think that we needed more?
