Anam Cara

Desire is often expressed in restlessness. Nothing satisfies. This found classical modern expression in the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Ironically, this is probably the Augustinian rock song. Long before the Stones, Saint Augustine had said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Our dissatisfaction could, therefore, be the admission and awakening of our longing for the eternal. Rather than being simply the edge of some personal emptiness, it could be the first step in the opening up of our eternal belonging. In a much similar vein, Martin Heidegger once claimed that boredom might be the ideal predisposition for the mystical. The German word for boredom is die Langeweile, literally, “the long while.” There is a certain irony in the realization that those who have succumbed to the utter indifference of boredom might find themselves already caught up in the most complex and challenging personal adventure: the mystical!

Our consumerist culture thrives on the awakening and manipulation of desire. This is how advertising works. It stirs our desire and then cleverly directs it toward its products. Advertising is schooling in false desire; it relies on our need to belong, our need to play a central part in society, not exist on the fringes of it. Because awakened desire is full of immediacy, it wants gratification and does not want to be slowed down or wait. It wants no distance to open between it and the object of desire; it wants to have it now. This manipulation of desire accounts for the saturation of our culture with products that we don’t need but are made to feel we do. There is no end to false desire. Like the consumption of fast food, it merely deepens and extends the hunger. It satisfies nothing in the end.

There is also a shadow side to desire; this is greed or addiction. When desire becomes blind to presence and becomes driven to have more and more, we have greed. It is as though some lonely infinite sleeps within desire, and when it comes awake it can destroy everything in its singular wish to possess. All perspective is lost, and vision is reduced to destructive ideology. This blind greed is at the heart of our environmental crisis.

In terms of its creative side, desire is the quickening of heart that calls forth change. Somehow the eye of desire can glimpse possibility where the overfamiliarized mind cannot see it. Once it glimpses this, desire cultivates dissatisfaction in the heart with what is, and kindles an impatience for that which has not yet emerged. Our dreams and fantasies showcase the directions in which our desire would love to lead us. Dreams are narratives of desire. We can learn the forms of longing within us, if we attend to our dreaming. There should always be a healthy tension between the life we have settled for and the desires that still call us. In this sense our desires are the messengers of our unlived life, calling us to attention and action while we still have time here to explore fields where the treasure dwells! FOR EROS

When you love,

May you feel the joy

Of your heart coming alive

As your lover’s gaze

Lands on your eyes,

Holding them,

Like the weight of a kiss,

Deepening.

May the words of love

Reach you and fluster

Your held self,

The way a silhouette of breeze

Excites a meadow.

When you are touched,

May it be the gentleness

You desire,

Your lover’s hands sending

Each caress deep into your skin

Like a discovering glance.

May slow sequences

Of kisses discover

Your secret echoes.

May your desire flow free

And never be fettered

By the thorn-chains

Of old guilt

Or crippled touch.

May you feel

How your soul loves

When your skin glows,

And your eyes darken

When promise ripens.

In the gaze of your lover,

May you see clearer

In the mirror

Of your own being.

May the silences

Be spaces where you

Can gather swiftly,

At ease with all

The subtle complexity.

May you be able to listen

To your lover’s heartbeat

And think only of the joy

You can awaken.

May you be able

To let yourself fall

Into the ocean rhythm,

Unfolding ever more

Until you become

One crest of wave,

Rising into wild foam

Whose beauty will show

In the graceful sweep

Of its home-breaking.

FOR FREEDOM

As a bird soars high

In the free holding of the wind,

Clear of the certainty of ground,

Opening the imagination of wings

Into the grace of emptiness

To fulfill new voyagings,

May your life awaken

To the call of its freedom.

As the ocean absolves itself

Of the expectation of land,

Approaching only

In the form of waves

That fill and pleat and fall

With such gradual elegance

As to make of the limit

A sonorous threshold

Whose music echoes back along

The give and strain of memory,

Thus may your heart know the patience

That can draw infinity from limitation.

As the embrace of the earth

Welcomes all we call death,

Taking deep into itself

The tight solitude of a seed,

Allowing it time

To shed the grip of former form

And give way to a deeper generosity

That will one day send it forth,