Anam Cara

2 Desires

There is great beauty in the notion of desire. Each of us is a child of the desire of our parents for each other. We are creatures of desire because we are creations of desire. The human heart discovers its most touching music when desire and love inform each other. When we love, we leave our separate solitudes and come toward union, where we complement each other. It is this ancient desire in every heart to discover and come home to its lost other half that awakens and activates its capacity for love and belonging. There are certain things that can happen to us only in solitude, and every life needs a rhythm of solitude in order to experience this. However, the experience of self-discovery, psychological integration, and spiritual growth can happen to us only when our desire draws us out of our shells and toward the precarious and life-giving sanctuary of another heart.

Desire is also at the heart of creativity. When we engage creatively, we depart from the fixed world of daily routine and grounded facts. We enter into a kind of “genesis foyer,” where something that not yet is might begin to edge its way from silence into word, from the invisible into form. This is the excitement that fuels the writing life: the desire for what might emerge when the imagination begins to trawl the crowded seas of the white page. There is some pure desire in us to know what is original, to take leave of all the expected scripted perceptions that manipulate our experience. We long for an experience that is unfiltered, where the unknown could reach toward us without being filtered by us. For this reason the artistic life is vulnerable; it is often a chaotic and overwhelming place to attend. Yet when something true begins to emerge, it becomes the golden moment that redeems months of splintered time.

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,

A tree into springtime,

May all that holds you

Fall from its hungry ledge

Into the fecund surge of your heart.

FOR LOVE IN A TIME OF CONFLICT

When the gentleness between you hardens

And you fall out of your belonging with each other,

May the depths you have reached hold you still.

When no true word can be said, or heard,

And you mirror each other in the script of hurt,

When even the silence has become raw and torn,

May you hear again an echo of your first music.

When the weave of affection starts to unravel

And anger begins to sear the ground between you,

Before this weather of grief invites

The black seed of bitterness to find root,

May your souls come to kiss.

Now is the time for one of you to be gracious,

To allow a kindness beyond thought and hurt,

Reach out with sure hands

To take the chalice of your love,

And carry it carefully through this echoless waste

Until this winter pilgrimage leads you

Toward the gateway to spring.

A BLESSING OF ANGELS

May the Angels in their beauty bless you.

May they turn toward you streams of blessing.

May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart

To come alive to the eternal within you,

To all the invitations that quietly surround you.

May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds

Into sources of refreshment.

May the Angel of the Imagination enable you

To stand on the true thresholds,

At ease with your ambivalence

And drawn in new directions

Through the glow of your contradictions.

May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes

To the unseen suffering around you.

May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places

Where your life is domesticated and safe,

Take you to the territories of true otherness

Where all that is awkward in you

Can fall into its own rhythm.

May the Angel of Eros introduce you

To the beauty of your senses

To celebrate your inheritance

As a temple of the holy spirit.

May the Angel of Justice disturb you

To take the side of the poor and the wronged.

May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you

In worth and self-respect,

That you may live with the dignity

That presides in your soul.

May the Angel of Death arrive only

When your life is complete

And you have brought every given gift

To the threshold where its infinity can shine.

May all the Angels be your sheltering

And joyful guardians.

FOR LONGING

Blessed be the longing that brought you here

And quickens your soul with wonder.

May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire

That disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease

To discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

May the forms of your belonging—in love, creativity, and friendship—

Be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.

May the one you long for long for you.

May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.

May your mind inhabit your life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world.

May your heart never be haunted by ghoststructures of old damage.

May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.

May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.

IN PRAISE OF AIR

Let us bless the air,

Benefactor of breath,

Keeper of the fragile bridge

We breathe across.

Air waiting outside

The womb, to funnel

A first breath

That lets us begin

To be here,

Each moment

Drawn from

Its invisible stock.

Air: vast neighborhood

Of the invisible, where thought lives,

Entering, to arise in us as our own,

Enabling us to put faces on things

That would otherwise stay strange

And leave us homeless here.

Air, home of memory where

Our vanished days secretly gather,

Receiving every glance, word, and act

That fall from presence,

Taking all our unfolding in,

So that nothing is lost or forgotten.

Air: reservoir of the future

Out of which our days flow,

Ferrying their shadowed nights,

The invisible generosity,

That brings us future friends

And sometimes stones of sorrow

On which our minds refine.

Air along whose unseen path

Presence builds its quiet procession;

Sometimes in waves of sound,

Voices that can persuade

Every door of the heart;

Often in tides of music

That absolve the cut of time.

Air: source of the breath

That enables flowers to flourish,

And calls the dark, rooted trees

To ascend into blossom.

Air, perfect emptiness

For the mind of birds

To map with vanishings;

Womb of forms

That shapes embraces

To hold animal presence.

Air makes the distance kind,

Opening pathways for the eye

To reach the affections of things,

Yet never lets its invisible geography

Come anywhere near thought

Or the voyage-edges of the eye.

Air: kingdom of spirit

Where our departed dwell,

Nearer to us than ever,

Where the gods preside.

Let us bless the invigoration

Of clean, fresh air.

The gentleness of air

That holds and slows the rain,

Lets it fall down.

The shyness of air

That never shows its face.

The force of air

In wall after wall

Of straining wind.

In the name of the air,

The breeze,

And the wind,

May our souls

Stay in rhythm

With eternal

Breath.

FOR THE SENSES

May the touch of your skin

Register the beauty

Of the otherness

That surrounds you.

May your listening be attuned

To the deeper silence

Where sound is honed

To bring distance home.

May the fragrance

Of a breathing meadow

Refresh your heart

And remind you you are

A child of the earth.

And when you partake

Of food and drink,

May your taste quicken

To the gift and sweetness

That flows from the earth.

May your inner eye

See through the surfaces

And glean the real presence

Of everything that meets you.

May your soul beautify

The desire of your eyes

That you might glimpse

The infinity that hides

In the simple sights

That seem worn

To your usual eyes.

FOR PRESENCE

Awaken to the mystery of being here

and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.

Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.

Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its path.

Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.

May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.

May anxiety never linger about you.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.

Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.

FOR FRIENDSHIP

May you be blessed with good friends,

And learn to be a good friend to yourself,

Journeying to that place in your soul where

There is love, warmth, and feeling.

May this change you.

May it transfigure what is negative, distant,

Or cold within your heart.

May you be brought into real passion, kindness,

And belonging.

May you treasure your friends.

May you be good to them, be there for them

And receive all the challenges, truth, and light you need.

May you never be isolated but know the embrace

Of your anam cara.

FOR BELONGING

May you listen to your longing to be free.

May the frames of your belonging be generous enough for your dreams.

May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart.

May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.

May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted.

May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time.

May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.

May you never place walls between the light and yourself.

May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.

FOR ABSENCE

May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell.

May you be generous in your embrace of loss.

May the sore well of grief turn into a seamless flow of presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from.

May you have the courage to speak for the excluded ones.

May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.

May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one.

May your longing inhabit its dreams within the Great Belonging.