Passionate Loving Kindness
What is passionate desire? How do we cultivate this in our lives? For years I feel I had no problem with this, but as I approach forty and all that goes along with this age, I find myself asking this question. At the same time, I do not want to compromise my current way of life where I have fallen into good habits and display a certain amount of discipline. So I ask myself, how do I cultivate passionate desire?
One way I mix up the norm is to take my recycle out naked. Being naked makes me feel like I am being raw and getting down to the roots of my existence, where I suspect desire and passion also live. This summer I spent many days in my yard, sitting on the earth meditating naked. Swimming in the pond in my birthday suit, and feeling the freedom of the element of water wash over and around my body, evoked a sense of passion. Today however, I took my recycle and garbage out with my clothes on as it is windy, rainy and cold. I just wanted to get it done. I also do not want to nor do I drink alcohol anymore, which at times has been a catalyst for love making in my relationship. It is just a bleary fall day, and I am wondering, how do I awaken my passion?
Last night I had a beautiful time in the company of others singing songs and eating food at a local gathering called Deep Song. I felt engaged in the conversations I partook in and found myself able to talk of my book with confidence. This felt so good. One of the bits of wisdom gathered from the short “sermon” was that hope is the opposite of fear and that loving kindness is the route to having success. These were valuable tidbits that I walked away with. I have discussed recently in a circle I attend, how I wanted to let go of fear in my life. To think of hope as the antidote or opposite, seems like a way to accentuate the positive rather than eliminate the negative. If I focus on hope and what this means to me, perhaps I will combat the fear that creeps in in the form of anxiety at times in my day to day. Practicing loving kindness as a means to success is another solid thing to meditate upon. I want to have success in my writing and with publishing my books. And yet I struggle with also wanting to live my life with meaning and focusing on my healing and basic health practices rather than working on or editing the many pages I have assembled to be ‘manuscript three’ or ‘book two’. I crave to work on my writing, but I want to live my day with purpose. If loving kindness is the goal, however, I believe I can achieve my success in a more organic and wholistic, less linear way. My journey is a path. My writing accentuates or documents this path. I must keep traveling down this path; I must keep living, in loving kindness, to have something to write about.
Perhaps if I continue to pursue loving kindness, my passion will awaken within me. I can only hope that my writing can be a vessel for expressing and channeling this desire. There may be the occasional frozen winter dip in the pond or naked escapade to take out the trash and recycle, and perhaps this will awaken my senses to the passion that I am already cultivating within my being. Can loving kindness manifest as desire? They seem so different from each other. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps loving kindness is mutable, soft, gentle desire, but the seed is really the same. Perhaps I can make passionate love to and through my life by practicing this way of being. As Mr. Rogers said, “There are three paths to achieving success at any endeavor in your life; Loving Kindness, Loving Kindness, and Loving Kindness.”