A Trouble with Passion

It might have been a little slice of danger from the start.

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Whatever is exhilarating is also risky, kind of like riding a roller coaster with your hands above your head and your feet so flip-floppy they won’t help you brace, especially during that first long wild dip, when your hair flies behind you at lightening speed and you can barely hear your own screams because they are folded into the chill of the collective scream, all the way down, until you level out waiting for the next rapid rise and fall.

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True, there is a steel bar across your lap that holds you to the seat, makes sure gravity will not pick you up and plummet you into mid air and sudden death, but let’s face it: you want to ride that roller coaster that way—reckless and reflectively—so you hand over a piece of yourself without knowing the ropes, the same as if you choose a back country trail without provisions or a map, You do it that way and you’re taking your chances that you'll know what to do when the danger rush comes flying at you, when there’s no time to think and certainly no time to plan.

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You know it makes more sense to size things up, , take your time and venture slowly, get familiar with what's known and what isn't. You know It’s better to not be surprised when you are not prepared, to keep the rudder steady, to drop Hansel and Gretal corn kernels behind you so the path stays familiar. But then again when you know your way, you’re not surprised, and when you’re not surprised, you’re not deep in the thrill and the rush ride that’s lost to you is not exactly small.
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Isn’t that why sooner or later you’ll come to admire people who just throw their arms up and go with it and venture forth, no map, no plan, no umbrella, no kernels of anything except the wild stallion within them, why you react with amazement as they decide to let loose, finally, fully, foolishly, yes, but who’s to say the benefit will not be the lovely freedom of unleashed passion, newly minted wonder, a way of moving in a sometimes flat world, a level of deciding that transcends and transforms everything that’s come before it?

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Don’t most of us envy people like that, wish we could do it that way too, at least sometimes? Don’t you want the earth to move, the foundation to shake, the stars to explode right in front of you, to throw you off your feet and in high into the air in one explosive bolt? Really now, Don’t you?
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I knew a woman who traded in her compass and her raincoat for the thrill of the open road. She burned her house down and everything in it one October morning and she never looked back. When she ventured forth, she was anchorless, weightless, unencumbered, clueless, totally wide and open and fresh and full. . It was like her heart had split down the middle, pulsating with its own raw recklessness, spilling forth love dust everywhere, no fences, no ambivalence, no back doors, not a molecule of second guessing. She slid onto that roller coaster seat and for two years she rode up the track and down, letting an unfamiliar and totally exhilarating passion slap her face, toss her from side to side, spike her right off her seat. Vibrant images and new possibilities flew by her with lightening speed, new colors and new words and new ways previously unknown to her.
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She lived that way without a thought. She cared deeply and loved foolishly and picked up a palette knife and painted amazing faces and landscapes and emotions, mostly in the calcium reds and brilliant oranges and an occasional tempering blue. She made love at least once a day, losing and finding herself in the estacy of her muffled screams and unbridled lust, savoring the sweat that trickled onto to her breasts, formed in the smallest dewdrops, she lying there having been taken and expelled and depleted all at once.
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One roller coaster dip after another, thunderous conditions that told her she was alive, ready to be taken and expelled and depleted again, and then again. She was free, a wild stallion without fences, finding her way to the top of the terrace, looking down, small pebbles of unsure footing that caused her no trouble.
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It’s hard to know what happened next. The change was imperceptible, like that story of the sleepy frog in tepid water, who does not notice the temperature is rising until the boiling point is reached and all options of the frog’s escape are gone.

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It might have been a brilliant day in early May, or perhaps through the heavy rains in late August, but one day she was simply no longer herself. Her heart was still split open alright, a straight incision so wide and so clean she had failed to notice how much of herself had slipped away. She looked for the familiar in the distance, wanting to confirm the boundaries of her territory. Tepidly she returned to the woody path she had traveled since childhood, shocked at the erosion of its sturdy riverbanks, dismayed that the steady current had overspilled on what was once dry and fervent land. She still returned to the wild roller coaster but the lifts and spikes now exhausted her, no longer satisfied her reckless hunger, but instead blurring her vision, knocking her into a crazy dizzy confusion where the quest for passion had blown her hunger to an unsustainable level.

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She had lost herself when she thought she’d been found. .
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Did you know this could happen? Have you already learned that fences sometimes protect, not just restrict? That passion sometimes overtakes, not just exhilarates? Do you know that hearts can roam free and wild for only so long, before they need to slow down, level out, open up and wide, yes, but did you know that hearts prefer a clean cut that expands and not explosives that blast?

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Because when your heart explodes, shards blow and fall everywhere, and you might spend years picking the blown apart pieces, trying to put them back together rightly. That is what happened to this woman I knew. It took her a long time to stop looking to find and repair all those pieces. It took her a long time to learn about balance and safety and steady sails. But she did learn. Every once in a while she is back on that roller coaster, whoopy-ing her way through a wild arms in the air ride, letting the wind take her again, leaving her umbrella and compass in a back room somewhere.
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But she has a back pocket now. And in it she has the smallest folded map, tucked there just in case, that shows her the way home, just in case. There are still nights she screams in wild passion, risks it all with gleeful abandon, nights when the lights blow and the earth rumbles, but that little map in her back pocket, it quiets her, knowing it's there.

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I'm always apologetic when I post a long piece like this. I know our blogs aren't made for long pieces. So if you've made it to this point, thank you. I hope you felt thr rush of the wind on your face reading this. And if by chance you found comfort in the end, you might as well know I couldn't quite move myself past the lament of it all.

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love

kj