LONGING
is the transfiguration of aloneness, the defenseless interior secret core of a person receiving its overdue invitation from the moon, the stars, the hidden night horizon and the tidal flows of life and love. Longing is divine discontent, the unendurable present finding a physical doorway to awe and discovery that frightens and emboldens, humiliates and beckons, turns us into traveling pilgrim souls and sets us on the road that begins in the center of the body, and then leads us out, like an uncaring invitation, like a comet’s passing tail, making us willing to give up our perfect house, our paid for home and our accumulated belongings.
Longing is felt through the lens and even the ache of the body, magnifying and bringing the horizon close, as if the horizon were both a lifetime’s journey away and living deep inside at some unknown core – like finding a home at last but at an immense distance, the experience of holding at one at the same time, a beautifully familiar, condensed strangeness.
In the longing and possession of romantic love it as if the body has been loaned to someone else, someone who from some remote place, has taken over our senses - we no longer know ourselves as we seem to go willingly through humiliations and abasements, absurdities and comic misrepresentations of our new and untried self. It is as if we have been set adrift on a tide: like Moses in his floating cradle, bumping along the reeds of the Nile, like a child lost in a panicked moving crowd and at times, like a struggling creature of the wild, stunned, gripped and lifted by a passing hawk.
Longing has its own secret, future destination, and its own seasonal emergence from within, a ripening from the core, a seed growing in our own bodies; it is as if we are put into relationship with an enormous distance inside us leading back to some unknown origin with its own secret timing indifferent to our wills, and gifted at the same time with an intimate sense of proximity, to a lover, to a future, to a transformation, to a life we want for ourselves, and to the beauty of the sky and the ground that surrounds us.
Longing is nothing without its dangerous edge, that cuts and wounds us while setting us free and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril. The foundational instinct that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world, that we are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all the odds. In longing we move and are moving from a known but abstracted elsewhere, to a beautiful, about to be reached, someone, something or somewhere we want to call our own.
...
'LONGING' From CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2015
Available http://
West from Necker Island
February 2015
Photo © David Whyte
https://www.facebook.com/pages/David-Whyte/213407562018588?fref=photo
excerpt of an answer by David Whyte in the fb comments:
"the place where the outer mind engages and imagines deeply felt desire is the place where longing takes an actual outer form. But we need to be merciful with our struggling selves, we are not saints, nor fully perfected, enlightened beings. We bring those longings into form depending on the level of our maturity, the place where we can actually sustain them in the world and where, if we are wise, they help us to take the next step in our journey. To wait forever for a perfect state of understanding regarding a longing is to excuse our selves from risking our hearts and to live in abstraction and insulation. A good case of heart break, fully experienced, is, after all, as good a doorway as any, to the next stage of that wanted maturity!"
No comments:
Post a Comment