JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Halley Suitt wrote this week on love and bravery (can’t get the permalink to work to the specific post):

Making the decision to love, pushing forward, or yielding to the allure of loving someone, laying back in affirmation, means you are going for broke. You are not hedging your bets. You lay it on the line.

If you’re in, you’re in all the way, to the hilt, no turning back to find an easy way home. In love you lose your bearings. The path back is covered in an instant. Beach sand footprints, blown away in an instance. Look back over your shoulder to see … nothing. You don’t even remember where your were before or WHO you were. You are changed.

Passion and love and sex make a mess of everything, but make everything perfect too. Loving someone does not require a permission slip, like a field trip to the museum.

Last night I read a parenting newsletter featuring a mom who said that she had learned to hide her joy. Hide joy?! As if it can be hidden. I began to wonder what kind of joy this mother thought she had.

Joy, like the love Halley described, can’t be bound in a box or kept on the couch. It wants to act. It must act. It bubbles and bursts. It is brave and bold. It can’t be hidden. It changes faces. It changes lives.

Passion is an overused word. I know I’ve used it and I read it in other’s writings. It has become ubiquitious. What everyone desires. But what does it mean? Words that are employed too often seem cheap syllables without significance, letters stuck together but devoid of life.

Besides, passion is a word better lived than said. The letters have less meaning than the expression and experience. Should I tell my husband I have passion for him? Or would he prefer that I show him?

Passion is what we do when we love someone or something beyond our fears. Is it crazy? Contagious? Certainly. As Bob V. commented earlier this week …passion can look a whole lot like a virus-induced insanity. Like a virus, others will catch what we have, when we are passionate.

Passion is joy we cannot hide. It drives our dreams and promotes our plans but it also motivates us to move in ways we had never imagined. To borrow Halley’s words, passion does not require a permission slip. It doesn’t even need to be mentioned; it is lived.