I wrote Longing in a single sitting in the morning quiet of an old Yorkshire Dales Inn I have visited since childhood. The evening before I had walked up high to a line of stone cairns looking down at the village. I was there to work up an appetite for the substantial fare provided every night at dinner and to take the air, but in that evening light, I suddenly felt the tear of what felt like a passing bullet, close to my ear. I looked round and saw nothing, I looked again and felt strangely puzzled, then came the tearing sound again, but this time I saw the cause, a winged bundle of aggression in the shape of a buzzard, that would-be, compact eagle, diving, and screaming its distinctive kee-yaa trying to drive me off, away from its nest in the wood below, its yellow eyes condensed on my form with unremitting intent; its nesting partner above in the sky circling in a larger gyre of surveillance and watching for other intruders.
My walk continued in the evening sunlight as if in the midst of a continuous ambush, the bird trying to attack me from every angle including from directly above. Looking up into its formidable eyes as it came straight at me, I felt charged, exhilarated, joyous, and warned, as if the ambush was the annunciation of enormous change, of some identity walking its unconcerned way through life, now dislodged from its easy onward way and given notice; as if the end of a certain epoch was being announced and a new one born but not yet in a way that could be recognized, and that I should be alert to a new inward and outward movement, some great tidal element of life coming at me from all sides, a symmetry longing for itself, trying to meet and create its simple central reflection at the center of a life and of a work.
LONGING
is the transfiguration of aloneness, the defenceless interior secret core of a person receiving its overdue invitation from the moon, the stars, the night horizon, and the great 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, makes us into pilgrim souls and sets us on a road that starts in the centre of the body and then leads out, like an uncaring invitation, like a comet’s tail, felt like both an unrelenting ache and a tidal pull at one and the same time, making us willing to give up our perfect house, our paid-for home and our accumulated belongings.
Longing is felt through the lens and 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 – as if we were coming home into a beautifully familiar, condensed strangeness.
Longing is nothing without its dangerous edge, which cuts and wounds us while setting us free, and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril.
In the longing and possession of romantic love, it is as if the body has been loaned to someone else but has then, from some remote place, taken over the senses – we no longer know ourselves.
Longing calls for a beautiful, grounded humiliation, the abasement of what we thought we were, and strangely the giving up of central control while being granted a new, watchful, scintillating, peripheral discrimination. The static, wilful central identity is pierced and wounded, violated and orphaned into its own future, as if 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 creature 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 a 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, which 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.
from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words: Revised Edition
An sublime invitation to pause, awaken and feel into my sacred seed of Longing. Gratitude.
Resounding in the way a piece of brilliant music can touch my cellular body. Every time. Thank you