Sometimes I am more attracted to what a woman is wearing than how she looks physically. Not in the sense that I want to try on the clothes, that is weird, more that I just think certain colours and fabrics make goddesses out of ordinary women.
Been reading a lot of Thomas Merton recently. The guy is a bit of a hero of mine because our childhoods and early adulthoods are quiet similar. It seems his mind worked a little like mine, from what I understand from the essays and biographies I have read.
He led me to the idea of the four basic instincts or ‘roots of passion’. These are ‘roots of passion’ toward god, but I’ve never been one to apply a theory in just its established direction. Instead I’ve decided to direct them into a desire to live. And here we go…
There are two positive roots which don’t require much explanation, they are clearly very easy things to draw a desire for life from:
LOVE
JOY
The two negative ones are far more interesting:
FEAR
This can be a great motivation, but I like to focus on the idea of moving with fear. Using it as a method of maintaining respect for life. In the same way that god is meant to be feared. (Here starts the regurgitation of my Christian upbringing.)
Proverbs 1:7 says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.”
I like to remove the word ‘LORD’ obviously and upon doing so, we have a whole new philosophy.
The fear of god is respecting him, obeying him, submitting to his discipline, and worshipping him in awe.
The fear of life is respecting it, not struggling in the face of its rules, accepting its limits and taking opportunities that present themselves and the last is rejoicing in life’s beauty.
GRIEF
This is a little more tricky, but I applied my technique in regard to depression… depression is the measure of our joy. Anything lost is only mourned because it meant so much to us. There is a balance to it, when struggling with loss, we have to focus on the feeling and move through it to pay for the joy we took in it.
Something else from Merton (paraphrased) “As if we were created to ask a question and in that creative act the question was answered. We are both question and answer in the absolute. The question is its own answer. It is an experience, ‘I am.’”
