Spiritual journeys and words inspired by the arts...

Matches and the eternal sunshine of the spotless soul ~ Lawrence of Arabia

Metaphor. I love metaphor.

Matches. I just posted one about matches. Matches and pain.

This one isn’t about pain. Not at all. It’s about perfection. This one is about the fire that burns inside each of us. Well, maybe there’s a little pain. It’s the pain you feel in your eyes as the sun rises beyond the horizon, growing brighter and brighter. But it’s a good pain, a pain I need to learn to feel. Not endure. Feel. It’s a pain like the ice cube’s first touch on overheated flesh, which is a funny pain to be talking about when the object of your metaphor is a match.

What got me going on matches and internal flames was this quote a friend posted a few days ago on Facebook.

We’re all born with a box of matches inside us. We can’t light them by ourselves. They can be lit from a melody, a sound, a caress, our lover’s breath, anything that pulls the trigger and sets off one of the matches. Every person has to discover what will pull the trigger and enable him to live. Because it is the explosive flare of the match that feeds our souls.

If there’s nothing to trigger the explosion, our box of matches becomes damp, and then we will never be able to light any of them. Of course it is important to light the matches one at a time, because if an intense burst of emotion were to ignite them all at once, they would produce such a strong brilliance, that before our eyes there would appear a tunnel of such radiance, showing us the path that we forgot at birth, the same path that calls us back to our divine origins.

~Laura Esquivel (Author of Water For Chocolate)

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