Balancing A Life Of Passion

If you’ve ever felt like there’s been moments or months where you haven’t exactly felt like yourself, you’ve probably recognized the importance of balancing a life of passionate fulfillment.

It’s a great concept, comes with a lot of gifts of reflection and self-discovery, and provides for those awkward transitional moments in life. It supports the process with a smooth attitude and approach to action, so whether your spirit’s feeling weary or full of vigor, you’ll stay better streamlined.

That process can be a difficult one to get used to, depending on your lifestyle. The good news is that staying open and willing, even in moderation, allows phenomenal growth experiences to become more well-rounded individuals and chiefly capable in whatever area of life we choose to place our focus on.

In association with the TCM I’ve been learning recently, specifically the Five Element Theory, I’ve found inspiration in my personal process of growth, which has felt grizzly but humbling and oh so valuable. Sharing the following, I hope you find elements you can attest to and a flow that brings change and the hand of opportunity offered to you by your own choice of when and where. It’s fun to allow the ‘how’ of opportunity to manifest itself, and whew! a load off the effort.

Personally, I’ve got a taste for intensity.

It is what gives me the greatest pleasure; the greatest thrill; the most satisfaction through any physical, emotional, spiritual experience, and although I’d like to include the mental aspect in this parade of enthusiasm, I’ve often found myself acting like a young child dissatisfied and indulging in tantrums of frustration at the challenge of mental intensity, whether quietly boiling inside, whining and impatient, or enraged and violently thrashing. Other times when I feel calm and capable, I revel in the capacity of an invigorating mental threshold to bear and cross also. This factor has been a great lesson. Overall, with Intensity is how I prefer to live life; and perhaps a bit too much.

I’m talking about the kind of intensity which is seen from the interaction of incomprehensibly scorching hot magma with indistinguishably persistent ocean water. As a walking contradiction and lover of intimately connected polarities, the intensity of this kind of relationship suits me well. I would often envision myself as the magma – firey, passionate, bold – a force to be reckoned with that I could exert or withhold at will toward anyone who may come within range. This is a sense of the power I imagine to have, although there is a predominant sense of gentleness that I commonly express, and it did not take long to realize that no matter whether I exerted it or withheld it, I would burn and drive people away by holding onto this power. Like magma’s interaction with the water, it solidified and turned my gentle heart hard. Scarred. Stolid and silent on the surface, rough and sharp like chipped Obsidian. And yet I am this magma that still flows deep below the surface: no series of interactions can toughen me to incapacitation.

As of late, tugging at the tendency to be all-encompassing, I had realized for far too long that playing the role of the magma could not provide the full nature of my heart’s expression without approaching the relationship differently, and so I slowly began to embrace an acquiescence of the ocean’s berth. At the shore or in deep fissures at the ocean’s floor, it was still only apparent to me that the magma was what brought the intensity, and that’s who I am; that’s what I crave. In these meeting places I would only see the water as being languid; lapping predictably and constantly, completely lacking the pith of the exciting, powerful qualities inbred in magma. Lava makes land, for crying out loud! It creates entire islands for new and exciting places to explore and provides lush, fertile soil for some of the richest plants and foods to grow. But something was missing, because food does not grow on hardened rock, and fertile soil is not an exotic roost for curious species to cultivate and commune if it is yet to be, still just solidified, blackened magma. Time is needed. Patience must first be cultivated.

Patience for slow, drawn out processes is very intense. I had been forced to develop this within myself in the seclusion of having driven most people away. During this time and private process, deep underneath the crusty surface of sociability, intense amounts of pressure were enacting upon me while I kept trying to move; tectonic phases of life barely shifting to where I might be allowed to freely express myself and develop a reciprocal relationship with others. Beautiful crystals, gems and precious stones have been cultivated within this environment of dark heat and intense pressure to maintain integrity. I felt my heart developing into a diamond the size of my chest, yet I would cry inside because I was under the notion that I could not share it with others for sake of being buried within my own internalization process.

And still I developed a greater, more appreciative sense of myself for being aware of these rich resources within, regardless of whether they could be seen or not. A fissure opened me up from this sense of self-love. The ocean’s vast and subtle pulse of emotions from wishing to connect with others bled into my internal broiling and spilled over to create druses – pockets of crystal beds – uplifting senses of gratitude and appreciation for this painful process. With their creation I felt a new surge that I could bring what I’ve learned in this time to the surface. The reluctance to discover water’s nature taught me a penetrating patience that I could now relate to water itself, coming from magma’s perspective.

There is great passion in water. It comes in the temperately influential power to absorb all of magma’s heat and pride in cracks on the ocean floor. It is the water that helps rapidly quicken the transformative process of lava and gives it an environment to develop varying shapes and properties that are not seen in its cooling on land alone, and variety is synonymous with beauty, in which passion revels. Closer to the ocean’s surface, when its waters come to kiss the slow drool of lava dripping out to meet it, it shows no fear of being vaporized at the touch of hot melting lips. Instead it explodes with excitement, bursting into steamy bliss as it’s sent straight up into the heavens. It does not die. It does not disappear. Water has been around long enough with the knowledge and patience of eons to know that no matter what influence, it will always come back into itself. And whether it comes mixed with the temporary torrent of a raging storm or falls back gracefully in a light rain, it cannot be broken; it forgives and accepts itself to become whole again endlessly.

Water, with its ancient patience, proves itself further to be more powerful because in fact it is more enduring. Not only does it lovingly absorb the heat and intensity of lava’s passion and stubborn pride to cool it off, it pummels the shores of these new volcanic lands into tiny granules of sand, wearing them down into something softer, more pliable and more welcoming with its slow and constant churning. From the sky, rains over time playfully tap at the chip on islands’ shoulders to the point that they finally leave an impression and loosen up that volcanic rock’s hard, seemingly invulnerable nature. This is what helps create the fertility of that soil so that what once was untouchable magma, deep beneath the Earth, and arose to become lava, roughened on the surface, is now an abundant and hospitable place for all forms of life to flourish.

It’s achieved through the beautiful, bold and besotted relationship between ocean and magma, water and fire, forged in a passionate intensity which these forces can mutually withstand from one another, and what’s more, create something else entirely through their attraction that can be shared with others. In each their own way, they can be accepting and submissive to the other as well as primordially obliterating one another, and still their relationship is perfect. Through eternal patience and acceptance of each other, their inseparable connection causes them to recycle and constantly renew themselves. Their appearances remain the same and yet change over the face of the planet in an intensely slow dance of mutual, harmonious recreation.