You and I Have to be Bad

The difference between desire and longing (Also: the difference between a praying mantis and putt putt)

Many spiritual traditions put an emphasis on detachment from our desire-nature that causes ‘endless suffering,’ but this is often misinterpreted to mean that we should bury, suppress, or rise above longing. Different from desire, which is the projection of our longing onto form and is always interested in being satisfied, longing is not something to be quelled.

In the Sufi way of seeing it, longing is a divine inclination, drawing us towards the Beloved. Just as lover and beloved long to be in each other’s arms, so too is it between us and the life which is meant for us. Like a plant growing towards the sun, longing is nature inclining us towards the light we need in order to be fruitful. But also, as Rumi writes, “that which you seek is seeking you.” So longing is not only the quality of seeking reunion, but the sound of something in search of us: the calling homeward.

-from Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner

note found in my bedroom, a directive to my partner that, when playing a family game with the children, we had to lose (controversial parenting hack!) I like this line as the title of a poem I will never write. Someone else, a poet, please do!

Dearly beloveds,

I’m including this quote by Toko-pa Turner because I’ve been thinking about what I said in a previous post about the ‘holy nature of desire.’ This passage more clearly puts into words what I mean when I say that desire, to me, is sacred. I don’t mean your craving for a Twix is sacred, although maybe I do - the older I get, the more I trust the wisdom of the body. I just mean that our nature, in many ways, knows what it needs. But most of us need to re-learn how to listen to it because by the time we hit adulthood, we have covered over some of the best in ourselves to fit in, to be accepted, and because we thought we had to earn someone’s love (news flash, this isn’t quite how love works. It is, however, how trauma works).

Listening to your own nature isn’t so hard, once you get the hang of it. But it does take some focus and maybe courage, too. (Can jokes yet be made about the courage it takes to eat a Twix? No?) I recently heard someone say that therapists on the internet tell you to feel your feelings but they never show you how. I feel like I’m in this camp right now. Listening to your nature is easy!! No, not quite. It has taken my whole life to tune the instrument of my body to the vibrations it needs, and the work is still ongoing. I do believe life-coaching has a hand in this tuning, and it is what I hope to offer others when we’re together. Yet I also believe this tuning takes place in many forms, some of them artistic, some of them nutritional, some of them familial. I am sorry that this post won’t go into technicalities, per se. I feel like, in some ways, I’m always pointing behind me, asking you to look at the vast mystery from which we all come. I don’t want you to take the same steps I took to reconnect some of my inner pieces. I want you to find the steps that you are supposed to take to find your inner homes.

live, imagine, draw. I’ve teased for whole seasons now about my new-old shelf that I reassembled and painted blue, which the kids and I did finish and Tim and I did bring up to the kitchen, which now holds our Cheez Its and dish towels. But I’m not actually ready to show it to you. Instead, here’s part of a different shelf that I brought up from the basement and retinkered. The top of that button box says Live Love Craft! (exclamation theirs) It makes me laugh so hard like, what was I thinking when I purchased Live Love Craft!? But it DOES make me happy, so . . . carry on with the buttons and exclamation points, I guess

birthday stickers / jar spells

This morning I had occasion to watch a video of the Lascaux cave in southern France. Seeing bulls and horses ripple on the walls, unfurling grandly across lumpen rock, I recalled something a visiting child said last week. Stepping into our house for the first time, they gazed at one particularly tchotchke’d corner and said, “Your house is very decorated.”

Lol. Yes, yes it is. When someone else came over, both my youngest and I clocked this person’s bumper sticker that read TRINKET LOVER immediately. We are *also* trinket lovers in this house, we cannot tell a lie.