It’s been a year since the cherry blossom in the front yard exploded in a sea of pink pompoms. Many hours were spent gazing up at the blue sky through that cotton candy extravagance. This year the blossoms have already reached and passed their peak and I have only spent one tired afternoon trying to gaze up but falling asleep from exhaustion. Too tired to witness. I want to bear witness. I want to live the type of life in which I can prioritize the blossoms when they show up. Any blossoms. Wipe the table clear, folks, we’ve got an emergency of emergent splendor. Do not look away!
Not every year is the same. It’s April but I’m not quite there yet. The days fill up with duty. Appointment. Friction. Confusion. Difficult decision-making that proves impossible – and therefore drags along into yet another season… What am I supposed to do here? I think of the options and a ball of panic spins around in my belly, rises up to my heart, troubles my face: I do not know.
I want to talk to you about desire. The distance that lives between what we wish were here and what exists. The long arms that can’t quite reach. I’ve been meditating on desire for a long time. Sometimes it feels like an impossible weight. Sometimes it feels like life force. I switch between those frames.
This week I did a tantric meditation with a tantric teacher I’ve worked with before. I didn’t have time to be at the live meeting – because of all those accumulated duties. Yet I did feel like I owed my own sanity some moments of introspective intimacy with the recorded replay. The topic of the meditation was desire. And one of the phrases that stuck with me was: “desire can be shy sometimes.” It’s something I often notice in myself and others. A blockage somewhere in a secret chamber of my heart, and the increasing discomfort in my body that serves as an alarm: Pay attention to this or live with the regret of this silencing. It’s only after I sit in that friction for a while, that I can distill the quiet desire underneath in its purest form. “Oh! I am pretending to be frustrated about XXX but what I really actually want is YYY.”
An added layer of complexity is the fact that there are multiple layers of desire that don’t always overlap. Some desires are small and spontaneous. Some hold the energy to alter the course of a lifetime. There’s the desire of the body. Of the mind. Of the heart. Sometimes the body wants something the heart fiercely rejects. Sometimes the mind wants something the body doesn’t agree with. Sometimes the body wants something the mind is very stubbornly trying not to want. Who decides?
As we keep changing, our desires keep changing. It takes constant effort to dig into the well of our own interiority to un-cover the life force, the love, the creation power that wants to be born through us. But the work doesn’t end there. Once we can finally be honest with ourselves, we now have the choice to share ourselves with another. A lover, a partner, a friend, a stranger. To say: This is who I am. This is my exact location. This is what I actually really want. And often, the scariest part: this is what I want, and wanting this involves or impacts you.
It’s this confession that makes us throw up from nervousness. Has us crawling into our safe cocoons. Shit our pants. Sends rivers of tears down our cheeks. Freezes us in motionlessness. Hide. Avert. Deny. Forget about it.
And yet, it is through this portal we can free ourselves into the spaciousness of truth. That’s where all intimacy lives. That’s where love deepens and expands. That’s where the links of relationship are forged and strengthened. That’s where there’s room to be still in the presence of this very moment. Alive like this.
Notice that this has nothing to do with the fulfilment of any specific desire. Nor with the dismissal of it. It has nothing to do with results or outcomes. The outcome is much less important than the energy that becomes available to us by simply acknowledging our own inner landscapes. No judgement. No rescuing required. No knights in shining armor saving the day. As the Bright Eyes song goes (which has been on my mind because of a strong current of serious zeroes nostalgia lately) “with just our flashlights and our love” – simply shining light on that which lives shyly, loudly, annoyingly, undeniably, urgently, wildly, obnoxiously, sweetly, ecstatically within us.
In November I started a new notebook and still haven’t filled it up. Writing too little, working too much. I always start my notebooks with a Rilke poem. As I was already wrestling with the topic of desire in November – I picked the following poem for the first page. Perhaps already knowing that this would be a period of discomfort, excavation, and confession. Rilke wrote these poems to God. But I am so blasphemous never to believe the mystic poets are ever only addressing God in their rapture. Yearning for God is yearning for Love. In human form, the divine is experienced through the senses, through our longing. To love is then, possibly, to know God. The yearning for union with life itself a testimony to our belonging in non-separateness. It is through separation I get to experience the sacredness of unity. My body aches. I will (have to) show you.
*It helps to read poems slowly, out loud, and several times in a row. They are asking for the same time and attention the cherry blossoms ask for. I will visit the front yard right after typing this to honor her righteous call. A desire for presence and slow-time beckons the body to stillness. More than getting what you want: May you find the courage to speak desire into space and sit in the vitality of that sound setting the air around you in motion.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours
Book of Monastic Life I, 16
Translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
Because once someone dared
to want you,
I know that we, too, may want you.
When gold is in the mountain
and we’ve ravished the depths
till we’ve given up digging,
it will be brought forth into day
by the river that mines
the silences of stone.
Even when we don’t desire it,
God is ripening
Metaphysical Mulch 