Passion times

So here’s a thought. I’ve recently attended a talk series on the subject of passion. The series is the brainchild of our own David Simmonds; the premise to invite individuals within our midst to talk about their purposes, whatever fires their lives. Talks took place Saturday afternoons in the lower part of the Wellington library. The individual speakers were as varied as the topics: civics to poetry to cooking to opera or to creeks. This is not about experts from out-of-town with a slide show; it’s about the folks in our neighbourhood.

The idea of sharing at this level in a place like ours is the mine of knowledge, the spectrum of topics, interests, careers, skills, professions, know-how that sits next to you in the coffee shop or at the haircutters. The fire may be contributing to big pictures such as food or engineering or education or health, or maybe discovering underwater caves or knitting socks. Somewhere our DNA will leave its footprint, big and small. The series is a reminder of how humanity has evolved. It’s a belief that each and every one of us comes into the world with the potential to make a mark in the collective consciousness. Like when you are thinking a thought or wanting to learn, a link in that direction appears in your midst. My take is there is no such thing as coincidence. Every thought added to something is potentially an act of creation. But like everything, there is a choice.

When I looked up the meaning of the word passion, I was surprised to see that the positive slant attached to the word is a fairly recent concept. The word passion is from the Latin ‘passio’ which means suffering. Well hell, ok? The word also means anguish or torment or ordeal, which can also read as trial or test. Aha! I spin to the legend of Robert Johnson. I love his music and the story works here. In actuality, it is a fable that long precedes him.

The legend tells of Johnson in the 1920s stealing away in the night from a job picking cotton in the Deep South. The only possession he takes is his guitar. By dawn, Johnson arrives at a crossroads where a stranger approaches. The stranger asks for a lend of Johnson’s guitar and begins to wail the deepest, crying-est heartfelt playing that anyone had ever heard. “Man! You gotta teach this man to play like that. I need to learn that before anything else,” said Johnson to the stranger. Well, the stranger was the devil and he laid out a deal: teach Johnson to play in trade for his soul. For Johnson, there was no other way; that was how he needed to live his life. The two shook hands at the crossroads and Johnson went on to become the father of the Mississippi blues, and while he lived only six years beyond that encounter, he has influenced practically every strand of music since. Elvis to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, most of it can be traced back to Johnson-style early blues. So they say that recognizing a passion within and dedicating to following it means there will be sacrifices along the way.

Another part that adds to this: the story of Renato and Shelly Rosoldo, who were anthropologists from New York and who, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, went to live with the Ilongot, an isolated tribe living in the rainforest of the Philippines. An anthropologist had lost his life on a previous mission there with these headhunters. The experience of the Rosoldos brought forward a concept of passion from the Ilongot. A word they used was ‘liget’; the closest to describe the meaning in English was “high voltage, a powerful energy running through and out of the body.” They upheld that we are all born with passion which is energy of the soul. It is passion balanced with knowledge, the creative force. Untempered passion is an unbalanced energy, a soul and life destroying force. We witness it daily: school shootings, ISIS, North Korea. The Ilongot knew that humans were not the wellspring of liget. While maintaining an isolated way of life, the Ilongot had begun to stop practices such as headhunting. Through knowledge they gained an understanding of the difference: liget is something oceanic that runs through the prism that we are. As to how clear that prism is, is again a choice.

I have taken a lot away from the library series, not the least of which is getting to know the people among us. Let’s hope that another chapter will resume soon— David is on the listen for suggestions. Not sure if the devil has an address around here. All I know is that he/she would be hellishly entertaining.