Ever feel lost lost, without direction or purpose? Where do you find ‘explosion’… people, work, music, movies, nature, etc? When the calendar flips from one year to a new one… or one decade to another, many of us pause and look at where we are on our journey. Are you learning and growing toward your potential? Are you in a holding pattern until some circumstance shifts? Living fully requires connection with your inspiration… your inner box of matches… I invite you to have a look at the excerpt below from Laura Esquivel’s novel, Like Water for Chocolate. Take a moment now and ignite a flame within you.
“As you see, within our bodies each of us has the elements needed to produce phosphorous. And let me tell you something I’ve never told a soul. My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said each of us is born with a box of matches inside of us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches.
For a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn’t find out in time what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lit.
If that happens, the soul flees from the body and goes to wander among the deepest shades, trying in vain to find food to nourish itself, unaware that only the body it left behind, cold and defenseless, is capable of providing that food.” –page 115
