What Do You Long for?

I am not the sort of person who walks around reciting poems to myself. I would like to be that sort of person, but so far, I haven’t put in the time or effort that memorizing poetry would require. In fact, I think the only poem that I know by heart is Shel Silverstein’s “How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes”—a relic from childhood. Fragments of other poems live inside me, though. Here is a line from Rilke that bubbles up often: “Go to the limits of your longing.”  

These words usually arise in the form of a question, posed by me to myself: Will you go to the limits of your longing? And the answer I try to live is a full-bodied yes.

If we lift this question from the context of Rilke’s poem and plunk it down into some quintessentially  American context, like Wall Street or Walmart, we arrive at one notion of what it means to go to the limits of your longing. It seems, then, to be a question of effort and extraction. Of squeezing all that you can out of life, out of the planet, out of the economy or your finances or your employees or your mind or your body. It seems to be a call to hustle, to grind, to climb, compete, consume, or acquire.

But this is not at all the context in which Rilke urges us to go to the limits of our longing, nor is it the way in which I mean those words when I repeat them to myself. Here is another fragment from the same poem—a fragment that I’m sure I’ve quoted to you before because I repeat it over and over to myself:

Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

These words aren’t a call to clinging or climbing or competing. To me, they register as a call to active surrender. To an intentional opening, softening, and allowing. They invite me to consider not what I want to get out of the world, not what I want to wrest from it with my tugging or grasping or clawing or clinging, but rather, how I might learn from it—from everything. How I might open and unfold within this world, with its beauty and terror. These words awaken a sense of how I want to be in the world. Will I go to the limits of that longing?

Here is the shortlist of what I long for:

I long to see and feel and live beyond the barbed borders of my ego.

I long to open to sun and moon and pitch blackness. To people who look like me and people who don’t. To the sentience that surrounds me, that stirs within me, that blurs the divides of me and you, of this and that, of here and there, of then and now.

I long to work and play and rest with equal exuberance.

I long to create—and to give myself fully to that process, letting it re-create me, over and over again.

I long to give. To hold the suffering of others as I strive to hold my own—gently and with compassion.  

I long to live with reciprocity. The natural world will always give me more than I can offer in return, but rather than slumping in despair at this thought, might I become more creative in my giving?

All of these longings grow from the awe-sparked awareness that we are not separate. This morning, as I walked Jeff the dog across the farm where I live, I wondered how many beings my path was intersecting with, simply by virtue of my moving through the world. There were too many to tally. The cedar, whose scent was carried on the wind and into my nose. The geese, whose honking and splashing vibrated my eardrums. The person, who recently dumped their trash down the cliff upon which I stood and who might in that moment have been sitting in their new Snuggler Recliner, as I gazed down at its packaging. The people in the plane that left a jet trail across the sky, dividing my vision in two. The blades of grass across which my shadow fell as I walked the fields, and the maple, whose thick trunk shielded my eyes from the morning sun. The fallen ash tree, etched with insect trails and lying across my own trail. The sun, whose light warmed my bare shoulders, though it beamed from such a distance that each moment’s warmth had to begin its journey from sun to skin some eight minutes prior. I could keep going, but your time would be better spent noticing the intersections that build your day, rather than the ones that structure mine.

What if this web of connectedness is the truest thing about life—truer than anything happening on Wall Street, truer than anything you can buy at Walmart, and truer than any of our myriad painful divisions? Let this ‘what if’ wash over you for a moment. What longing does it spark inside of you?   

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