Anam Cara

The Voices of Longing

Every human heart is full of longing. You long to be happy, to live a meaningful and honest life, to find love, and to be able to open your heart to someone; you long to discover who you are and to learn how to heal your own suffering and become free and compassionate. To be alive is to be suffused with longing. The voices of longing keep your life alert and urgent. If you cannot discover the shelter of belonging within your life, you could become a victim and target of your longing, pulled hither and thither without any anchorage anywhere. It is consoling that each of us lives and moves within the great embrace of the earth. You can never fall out of the shelter of this belonging. Part of the reason that we are so lonesome in our modern world is that we have lost the sense of belonging on the earth.

If you were a stone, you could remain still, gathered in silent witness in the same landscape. The infinite horizons would never trouble you. Nothing could draw you out. As a human, your daily experience is riven with fracture and fragmentation. You wander like a nomad from event to event, from person to person, unable to settle anywhere for too long. The day is a chase after ghost duties; at evening you are exhausted. A day is over, and so much of it was wasted on things that meant so little to you, duties and meetings from which your heart was absent. Months and years pass, and you fumble on, still incapable of finding a foothold on the path of time you walk. A large proportion of your activity distracts you from remembering that you are a guest of the universe, to whom one life has been given. You mistake the insistent pressure of daily demands for reality, and your more delicate and intuitive nature wilts. When you wake from your obsessions, you feel cheated. Your longing is being numbed, and your belonging becoming merely external. Your way of life has so little to do with what you feel and love in the world but because of the many demands on you and responsibilities you have, you feel helpless to gather your self; you are dragged in so many directions away from true belonging.

I was once at a wedding at which an incident occurred; in fact, it was more an event. The wedding breakfast was over, and the music had begun. An older woman was there. She was a quiet person who kept to herself, a shy country woman who was invited because she was a next-door neighbour of the bride. Everyone knew that her husband was an upright person, but mean and controlling. They suspected that she had a very hard life with him. There always seemed to be a sadness around her. Though he was quite wealthy, she never seemed to have anything new to wear. She had married young in a culture and at a time when if you made a huge mistake in your choice of partner, there was no way out. You continued to lie on your bed of thorns and put a face on things for the neighbours. At the wedding, she began to have a few drinks. She had never drunk alcohol before, and it was not long until the veneer of control and reservation began to fall away. The music was playing but there was no one dancing. She got up and danced on her own. It was a wild dance. It seemed that the music had got inside her and set her soul at large. She was oblivious of everyone. She took the full space of the floor and used it. She danced in movements that mixed ballet and rock. Everyone stood back, watching her, in silence. Her poor dance was lonesome, the fractured movements, the coils of gesture, unravelling in the air. Yet there was something magical happening in it too. Often there is a greater kindness in gesture. Here she was dancing out thirty years of captive longing. The façade of social belonging was down. The things she could never say to anyone came flooding out in her dance. In rhythm with the music, the onlookers began to shout encouragement. She did not even seem to hear them; she was dancing. When the music stopped, she returned to her table blushing, but holding her head high. Her eyes were glad, and there was a smile beginning around the corners of her mouth.