I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming Purpose and Passion - Softcover

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Inspirational speaker, writer, and researcher, Dawna Markova, PhD is CEO emeritus of Professional Thinking Partners, an organization that teaches collaborative thinking to CEOs and senior executives around the world. She has served as a senior affiliate of the Organizational Learning Center at MIT, and a consultant member of the Society for Organizational Learning and has received a Vision to Action award for her work originating the Random Acts of Kindness movement, the Foster Grandparenting and Peer Counseling programs, and the World Wide Women's Web. One of the creators of the best-selling Random Acts of Kindness series, Dawna is the author of many other inspirational books, including Reconcilable Differences, Collaborative Intelligence, A Spot of Grace, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life, The Smart Parenting Revolution, The Open Mind, How Your Child Is Smart, No Enemies Within, Learning Unlimited, and The Art of the Possible, as well as the Open Mind Audio Series with Sounds True. She is also a contributor to For She Is the Tree of Life: Grandmothers Through the Eyes Of Women Writers, and Fabric of the Future.

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Two months wrapped in memory and meditation. I am sitting in what was my mother's chair at what was my father's desk on a pillow I bought for myself that says, “Welcome to Our Cabin.” When I look out the windows to the right or to the left, all I can see is the swirl and swoop of snow, and the shadows of big old spruce trees, a circle of silent sentinels. I am sitting in the middle of a blizzard and the sky overhead, like God's eye winking, is bright blue. A half-hour ago, big gray buffalo stormclouds completely engulfed the mountains. Such a vast expanse, wide enough to hold several weathers all at the same time. This sky is teaching me about what my mind can be and do.

It's past one in the afternoon and I haven't eaten yet. I'm not hungry. I'm waiting for a signal from the inside. My body must know when it needs food. I'm breaking so many habitual rules and instructions that lodged themselves in my brain decades ago. I've been peeling away the rigid beliefs and attitudes, rhythms and reasons that keep me numb and closed in as if they were cornhusks.

To explore what it would mean to live fully, sensually alive and passionately on purpose, I have to drop my preconceived ideas of who and what I am. It is as if the salt of years is running free from me. Like so many of us, my head has been stuffed full of knowledge, but something in me is still starving. So here, I seek to empty it of the stories, explanations, and interpretations I am clutching in the fist of my mind. When did it get so tightly closed that it became numb? And what was it holding onto anyway? I want it free. I want my heart and soul free. Free of and free from. Free of struggle, free from doubt in the canyons of my bones, free from running from the truth of knowing that something has been missing.

Unclutching, emptying, opening, then wondering, as if I am releasing a small bird. I look at my hands. The left one shows a pattern of four arteries like a river, while the right one is like a web. They are my hands and I haven't really noticed them since I was a child. Where do the images come from that they have been drawing on the empty pages of my journal? Where do my dreams come from, now that I am eager to give attention to their mystery? And where do the stories come from that gush forth onto the page even when there's no one to entertain? Something is happening. Questions float in the night like moths.

Wondering. What am I reaching for? What is the urge that calls me beyond the familiar into unexplored territory? What is smoldering inside me? My passion is missing. Where is my passion? Has it unraveled from wear and tear?

I found a paper wasp's nest hanging abandoned from an aspen branch in the woods yesterday, an empty husk. It spoke to me: I am gray and dry now. My round womb-like husk is layered with many thin but tough sheets of paper. I hide a honeycomb that once was filled with a hive of life. They swarmed in me, all around me. They were a colony with individual directions and intentions, but they were also one larger self. Now they are gone. I am hollow. I have served my purpose. I am a reminder of all the life that was born in me and moved through me. I hang here waiting to be found, perhaps to be cherished for all I have contained and been.

It haunts me. Is it a mirror for my passion? By passion I don't mean sex or desire. I don't mean what happens to you when you wear Obsession, drive a Porsche Carrera, weigh ninety-six pounds, and are lusted after by someone with a deep cleft in his chin. I mean the natural life energy that exists inside each of us, urging growth. A deep and natural pulse that tells us to live from the inside out, to reach in and reach out for all that is possible to know, to contribute, and to receive. I may have lost the feeling of it right now, but I am beginning to think passion exists in the relationship between things, between the self and the rest of life, between forces in opposition to each other, between polarities and paradoxes, between and beyond the river of either/or that seems to divide so much of our world.