“Passion, it lies in all of us, sleeping… waiting… and though unwanted… unbidden… it will stir… open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us… guides us… passion rules us all, and we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love… the clarity of hatred… and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion maybe we’d know some kind of peace… but we would be hollow… Empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we’d be truly dead.”

We are each a volcano, some slumbering, some dormant, some smoking our warnings. Deep down, far deeper than the conscious mind can travel is a writhing tide of smoldering emotions bubbling from time to time to the surface.

Though we may not burp our sulphuric ashy cries, or wallow in thick oozing rivers of despair it does not mean that they are not there.  With out warning, with out the slightest inclination one day we erupt in fury, despair, destruction, all the while the people living on our peaceful slopes never having a clue we were capable of such destruction.

Sometimes it takes so little, a little shift here, a little less room there and we are left with no room for our underground lakes of pure emotion, needing relief they burst forth toward the surface, literally blowing our tops and poisoning our own lives, scorching all who ignored the warnings, subtle as they were.

The aftermath may take days, years, or decades to clean up. People move back onto our now peaceful slopes and continue their lives in our shadows. Some know what this mountain is capable of but move back anyways, some forever move away, horrified and traumatized from the memory.

What they will never understand, these people that move from our lives, is that with each eruption, with each puff of smoke little bits of our true souls emerge, gasping, flying, exploding into being.  Those that move back to our slopes and take up life, accepting this as one accepts the weather, have seen more of the Divine, more of the pure human soul, than they will ever know. 

These are the people you will and forever know as your friends, the people who come back even after you erupt, the ones that stood on the edge of the volcano and said “I’m here”.