“Don’t let anything take it away!”
Natalie Goldberg’s words bounce off the inside of my brain. What do I want bad enough that I wouldn’t let anything take away. Where is my passion struck like a match just lit. What juices me up and kicks my adrenaline into gear.

I think through the thinks that in my past would be that torch, that flame that would char my day-to-day interests and consume me. It was always some creative act and nature.

The natural world has spoken to me for many years, whether hiking the Colorado trails, tenting in the Pine Barrens of N.J., or having a conversation with God through the energy of a large turtle in Boonton, North Jersey.

A friend and I had a conversation this morning about conduits and clear channels to hear things through…mine was a good sized turtle in the multi-colored woods of N.J.

Dance was my medium of self-expression during my teens and twenties. I lived to dance. The underground music of the late 50’s and 60’s, the Doo Wop and R&B replaced the ballerina dreaming of the classical music I listened to as a child. Saturday nights I went dancing wherever there was a deejay and some records.

For a period of time, married with kids, walking on the beach was a passionate necessity, yet even then, poetry accompanied me. It had been intermittent since high school, but those beach-walking days really drew it out of me. Sadness was the doorway into my writing then. It would take years for the joy of life to replace that.

I get fires up around causes, the underdog and imbalances. My Aquarian nature is very tuned to those aspects of society. Someone has to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, be they human or otherwise. Into those spaces, I can easily step.

I look at my passion. I look at surrender. They both play an important role with each other. I can take something on with a fervor that could save the world. And I can drop it the next day if I need to.

So even though writing feeds off that fire in me, and I can direct that heat onto the page, it’s also something I could recess to the back burner if I saw the need to focus on something more vital. It does not consume me, but writing feeds me. It is an outlet, a gift, that has always been there. Yet it doesn’t represent all of who I am. Just something I’m invested in doing at this point.

Jyoti