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 and with its own secret
timing, indifferent to our wills, and at the same time, outwardly, an
intimate sense of proximity, to a lover, to
a future, to a transformation, to a life we want for ourselves; to the
beauty of the sky and the need for a new ground beneath it.
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 is
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.
© David Whyte: from Readers’ Circle Essay, “Longing” 2011
