Yearning

 "To inhabit was the most natural joy when I was still living inside; all was garden and I had not lost the way in." Helene Cixous

In my dream, I was a child again, a passenger in my father’s car as he drove us home from someplace in the city. The sky was newly minted in night; there was a lingering afterglow of daylight, but it had turned inky blue and was deepening into darkness. The lights of passing cars slid by, streetlights blinked, and the windows of the buildings held warm yellow light illuminating lives whose mysteries I would never know. Stars were snagged in branchy treetops, and I felt safe and sleepy as the world slid by, my father at the wheel. Everyone I loved was still alive. I believed in people and had faith in the unwritten story of my future.

I don’t know what prompted that particular dream; maybe it was an unconscious yearning to feel safe and certain again as we all careen along in the runaway train that our country has become.  These days are fraught with danger and disillusionment, and I long for things to make sense again, but maybe that longing will help prod my deeds and fuel my spirit, and in the meantime, I still see flickers of magic all around me, and I can summon up the sense of being loved, and there’s strength and comfort in that.

In fact, I happened upon a lovely phrase by the writer Devin Kelly about the condition of longing, in which I clearly dwell. He observes that longing contains the implicit recognition that there is an impossible distance between where you are and what you want and concludes: “[Longing] is to fill that impossible space with possible things. It is to make of your life a kind of dream and to make out of your dreams a kind of life.”

I’ve never seen it expressed so clearly. And I understand that I inhabit a yearning rooted in my earliest sense of wonder and love, intensified by loss, and forever lured onward by possibility and the sunlight of imagination.

Still drenched in the lazy pleasure of that dream as morning came, I looked out the window and saw a lanky young coyote napping in the yard, completely at ease. He rose in his own time and slid away under the fence into the greater wildness. White cattle grazed in the adjacent field, a ridiculous turkey strutted by, and I thought to myself, as I do almost daily, how astonishing and unlikely it is that this is where I live.

I avoided my phone, not ready for the daily barrage. I had my coffee with longing and went for a walk, past hazy mountains and a very green golf course, over the bridge to the Mission garden, with its shrines and flowers and statues. An elderly man with a cane and an old-fashioned fedora bowed in prayer, poignant and earnest, beneath a life-sized Jesus.

The poignance of being human. That’s a phrase John O’Donohue used in an On Being podcast I heard years ago, and I think I've been trying to get a handle on this all along. Being alive is such a contradictory state; each of us is a manifestation of miracles but we are barely blundering through, acutely conscious and yet so unaware, experiencing all this love and pain and wonder without knowing what it means, soon vanishing into what we can neither imagine nor perceive. No wonder we are filled with longing.

But thinking about John O’Donohue brings me to perhaps my favorite of all the things he said, which is that one's identity is not equivalent to one's biography, and that "....there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary."

A place within us of sureness and tranquility. How sweet and comforting that is! It acknowledges the miracle-ness of each of us, delivered pure and beautiful from the invisible to the visible realm. I can’t always find that confident, unwounded place in myself, but I know there is a spark in me, and it makes me want to try harder, be better, never give up.

And I am not sure how to apply all this now, but I know this is a time for being real and true and brave, even when I would prefer to sleepily watch the lights slide by from the backseat of my childhood. May our longing motivate us, and may our decency and dignity demand the leaders and society we deserve.  The world is dazzling me and breaking my heart, all in the same moment, and that’s the way it is and always was. I have not lost the way in.