Do What You Love

I believe in love, real love and living my life with a courageous passionate purpose to that end exclusively, authentically and loudly.

I also realized that so many of us don't, are too afraid to live our lives outside the status quo box. While we don't admit it consciously, we are afraid to live our lives out loud, in bright technicolor, are afraid to make a mistake, be judged wrong for something we needed or felt was what we should do, afraid to be thought "not smart enough," "not educated enough," "inadequately social," "unloveable," etc., the list is virtually endless. But, to live authentically, is to shout back at those limiting voices, "STOP!" and pick up your own beating heart, and give it another option.

I felt sad that so many people I know and love didn't know me and didn't know themselves because, like most of us, they'd put a lid on their hearts, buried their right to be vitally, vibrantly alive. We are actually taught to do this, rewarded by school and parents to do this, and there are books and news articles abounding that actually teach us how to do this - to live inauthentically so to be successful - successful at what? fitting in? fitting in to what? making money? Really? so that at the end of your life, after the stock market has fizzled out everything, you will look back and realize that you spent an awful lot of your life doing absolutely nothing. I'd rather fail at that miserably and succeed at finding my passionate purpose and living it loudly, in love with ALL of you, God, our beautiful Earth.

I invite you to really have the courage to live your truth, do what you want and say what you think, because, as Dr. Seuss once profoundly wrote, "those who care don't mind and those who mind, don't care." And, as one far wiser man once said in the Gospel of Thomas, "Don't do what you hate." When I first read that, I stopped and wondered,"did that say what I thought it said?" "Don't do what you hate?" When have I done what I hated? Don't we all conspire silently to do what we hate? Because, what if we didn't? What would happen? Would the world stop spinning? Maybe wars would stop, maybe the power brokers in our world would stop being enabled by we collective many?

Then I wondered, when have I done what I loved? When have I told someone I loved what I wanted to do that may have been different than his or her plans? When did I have that courage? When was the last time you did what you loved? That's even more challenging. It's easy to serve others' dreams because then we don't have to challenge ourselves to discover our hearts and our own dreams. We can live like we're living, but we're really doing what we were told we should do and we're just following the world's marching orders, step in line, step in time. It is far more difficult to do what you love because it means transcending all those layers of life that we've put over our hearts. I once wrote that finding our heart, where the radiant Holy Spirit lives within, is like doing an archaeological dig. But, keep on digging anyway.

Each of us could live another 30 years. So why are we wasting our time trying to fit into this tight lifestyle that suppresses our own authentic creative madness?

Life could be long, very long, I hope we all can have the courage to live what we feel in our hearts, live lives of love by first honoring our own hearts, our dreams, reach for them with a devil-may-care passion and be willing to meet disaster at the front door the minute we do. There will be many in our lives who will try to keep us right where they like us, at their command. Be daring, dream big, and go for it.