Yearning
I have been asked by several loyal readers when we would write again. Both Robert and I have been ill in different ways. I want to try to begin a dialogue again, and thank you for your patience.
Tonight my heart is dominated by yearning. The films of the great French director Francois Truffaut are filled with yearning. George Delarue wrote many of the soundtracks which speak the feeling language of music to accompany the bittersweet images created by this most tender of film makers. If you have not seen Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Bed and Board, Stolen Kisses, The Man Who Loved Women, Shoot the Piano Player -- you owe it to yourself.
What is this yearning? Our desire to be met, to be held, to be truly seen but not controlled. The fragility of life, which stubbornly endures despite all heartache and impossibilities. The humor, the arrows of eros. There is something tragically endearing in that. Freud and Jung used a clumsy psychological term, libido. Freud related it to a sexual "instinct" but Jung was closer in describing a life energy, the pulse of nature, or of God stretching out to explore and create. Perhaps yearning is what quickens the pulse and moves the green stem toward the light. In therapy one must always look for the yearning, how it has become blocked or limited. If I can help someone touch some aspect of their yearning, we can get things moving again. One can live on a diet of duty for years, but it is yearning that makes life worth living.
Woody Allen once joked about a relative who thought he was a chicken. When asked why they didn't get the poor man help, Woody replied, "We need the eggs." We all need the eggs. We need to share our yearnings and have them honored, even when they are perhaps illusory. Otherwise life is flat and two-dimensional. A fool who pursues his illusions becomes wise. Life is simultaneously absurd and a miracle, ridiculous and filled with awe and beauty. Without yearnings I am serenely indifferent, cut off, lonely.
4 comments:
I agree. Without yearning or a desire or a certain amount of angst to "become", one simply gets stuck in being-meaning surviving and remaining afloat-not "existing". I sometimes feel, I am stuck in such frozen state.I do not know what warmth and whose will thaw the ice.Many times the question of "what do I want" is most difficult to answer.
Yes, the "what I want" is usually distraction from "what wants me." The ego and our ego-driven society is filled with distractions which separate us from our true heart's yearnings. It is said that all yearning is hunger for unity with God, yet I come to know this through my interactions in the world. Theoretically I should love all children as I love my child, but my heart opens in relationship. It is the shared life (much of which is tedious) that opens me and teaches me. When I look across and catch a glimpse of the eyes of my beloved I experience a brush with the divine, the world is "animated" (filled with soul) again; yet I pass thousands of people on the street who do not open my heart as she does. Such a mystery. All I know is it is a sad mistake to allow one's yearning to be muted by fear.
Having just read Inner Gold, I was in a kind of earthly rapture, if that is possible, and I found this site. I have been reading, reading, reading, everything from Keats to A Course in Miracles--and being sometimes silent, too, for nearly 40 days now. Then I read Johnson, again, and all my questions were answered in the first 27 pages. Thank you.
It seems to be a point in embracing solitude where all day, I couldn't focus, couldn't settle for one desire. I changed the ink in the printer, fed the dogs, and made tea, while I was on the phone with a friend who told me she is leaving her husband of 30 years. I like to think of myself as a good friend. Then I ran to Costco to buy a GPS because I have been getting lost. The book has left me wanting nothing more than a cigarette right now, and the hope that my friend calls me back. I wish that Dr. Johnson could hold my gold for a day. I know what I really want, and it is unbearable. Costco doesn't carry it, but a cigarette just might come close--until it really comes.
Your are doing good work here. Is there a workshop on the horizon?
Beautiful post. Yearning may indeed be illusory, but what are our lives without it? The trick is to indulge yearning just enough for it to pull you forward but not too much so as to be enveloped and immobilized by it. Yearning is limitless and insatiable and thus has great destructive potential.
Post a Comment