Passion: Writing from a prompt and trying to word 'happy'.

At Roath Writer's last night we looked at the poem 'Happiness' by Raymond Carver

Happiness

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
 walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.



Which, the more you read, turns out to be not that happy at all (well, that's my interpretation of it anyway). We were then asked to write on a scrap of paper a word which is associated with positive feeling, be it an emotion of more abstract thought, and then pass it on five people to the left. I wrote 'sunshine' which then got passed to someone who hates sunshine - oops. So I got the word 'passion', which I can't say I've ever tackled in my writing before. But anyway, I wrote this:

Passion and fruits


Passion: a word usually connected with steamy, sweaty infernos or the content of the well-fingered pages of a charity shop Mills and Boon paperback.

However, I don't see my passion in that. I attach my passion to those with passions, those who love the bizarre, the hobbyists, the obsessors, the midnight ramblers and the specialist readers. To the ornithological variety perhaps, a man who can spot a goldfinch at 50 yards from its plume alone, or converse unashamedly with the song thrush.

But it doesn't have to be birds, it can be anything - an arachnid devotee, the Napoleonic era expert, the orchid enthusiast, the aficionado of narrow boat construction. A passion that takes you to distant lands and the dustiest corners of the book shop, that takes up every Sunday and most of your spare change – that is the passion I am drawn to.

I can bathe in your eccentricity and revel in the crackle of your energy to the point where I will meet you before dawn to watch for otters on a river bank or fumble in the dune grass on a stormy day for discarded World War Two bullets. I will feed from a passion, get swept up in it, if it is strong enough.

So tell me about steam engines or tree frogs or home brewing or Georgian furniture, and as you talk, I allow your passion to become mine, just for a while. I will read from your page and sing from your hymn sheet and I will feel that much more strongly than even the largest amount of Shades of Grey.