Let it yearn:
On making contact with THE heart’s desire
I’ve become interested, over the years, in the power and function of yearning. Not wanting, not desiring, not hunger, but the deeply felt soul-need for something we do not have, that we do not see coming, that we have no idea how to get, that may be totally unreasonable, and impossible – yet, we yearn for it none the less.
People oppressed, jailed, confined, enslaved yearn for freedom. My grandmother-in-law told us only a few stories of her time in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson. One day while she was forced to perform pointless and exhausting manual labor, “carrying rocks back and forth” near the outer fence - she heard a man’s voice who was marching past. He spoke softly in Hungarian to all those near the fence line. She dared not look up but she heard him whisper as he walked past: “Only thirty days more… only thirty days more…” She kept hatch marks near her bunk counting off the days. When more than three months had past, and she was still laboring near the fence she heard the same man’s voice, saying the same thing. “Only thirty days more…”
Furious, she dared to whisper back: “Why do you say that?! I heard you say that three months ago!” He replied sotto voce: “We all need a date to yearn for. If we don’t yearn for some day ahead, we will despair.” She would tell this story commonly at the end of the Passover meal, before we all raised our glasses and exclaimed: “Next year in Jerusalem!”
Our soul’s longings are different from our bodily appetites or our ego desires. We yearn for deeper things. Mystic traditions suggest all our earthly desires are misplaced yearnings to be reunited with the Divine. Yearnings are a kind of homesickness for a place we have never been, and that may not even exist.
Many rational people, when I ask them to identify their yearnings, reply: “What is the point? It ain’t gonna happen.” and that may be perfectly true. I’m not arguing that. There is something painful about yearning, about making contact with our deepest longings, that exists far beyond, below the ego’s reasonable assessment about our available and potential environmental resources. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is reasonable or not. Yearning sets off a conflict between our soul, and our reason. This hurts, creates tension, and somehow breaks our hearts.
But I say: yearn anyway.
I agree with the man on the far side of the fence as he is marched off to work at some factory that has contracted with the Nazi’s who enslaved and tortured him. Our yearnings have some life-giving power, if only we can withstand the heartbreak. And I’ve found that when I do not shoot them down as soon as they emerge, it seems that they somehow take flight, and lead toward some piece of something I saw no possibility of ever living out. Sometimes I wonder if my yearnings are sent backwards in time through some wormhole, showing me little snapshots from the future - axial moments - so that when I eventually stumble upon them I might regard them as precious.
Yearnings also embarrass us somehow. They reveal us, in our most non-rational state. We fear that others will scoff at the impossible fairy tale of our heart’s desire. That we will be told to pull ourselves together and focus on all the practical actions we can take in the world around us. We are sure we will be shamed for indulging in such childish impracticalities.
Indulge anyway.
Here: I’ll go first. Here is a persistent yearning that I have tried to kill off for decades. I know how silly it sounds. I also know where it comes from – and I can chart its evolution from childhood to the present.
I yearn, always and still, for a community of seers, of teachers, of elders, of freaks or bodhisattvas. People who have survived their own traumas and narrative burdens, who have mourned their losses, and who are called to live a new life, and to liberate others. I’ve imagined a knock on the door, since I was tiny – a magic band of people telling my parents: “She is one of us. She needs special guidance to complete her work on this earth and to prepare her for what lies ahead.”
In second grade I saw a production of Godspell - all these future apostles hearing the call of a ram’s horn that no one else could hear. The horn would sound, and I would follow – arriving at a sacred fountain where I would find my people. The ones that I didn’t have to pretend to be bigger for or smaller for. The place I belonged.
As a child actor, I hoped each cast that I performed with of would stay together forever. Closing nights left me sobbing in the car on the way home every single time. As I grew older I yearned to be a member of an inspired repertory company – like the Mercury Theater or Steppenwolf. As an emerging clinician I had fantasies of an elite cutting edge interdisciplinary treatment team reading one of my published papers and inviting me to join them in their work at some prestigious clinic or institute. As a mother I yearned for a circle of sister-mothers, and I found one for a time in Brooklyn at the Harry Chapin “baby-playground” by the East River. But too soon our differing disciplinary, educational, and developmental mommy-values and schemas pulled our alliances apart – as we came to find each other’s social and class mores intolerable. I’ve formed and participated and left behind more community organizations than I can count.
On the one hand this is all as it should be, all natural, all temporal, all time limited. No phase of life or community lasts forever. I accept this. I mourn this.
And I know where the yearning comes from: I spent decades in psychoanalysis mourning the complete and total obliteration of my family and community of origin.
I yearn anyway.
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Even now, past midlife - on stormy nights I sometimes imagine I hear the knock and open the door. “You have been waiting for us for years” they say “It is time.”
I recognize something in their eyes. A group of four or five people. Young, middle-aged, and elders. Of varied races and gender identities. People who have survived something impossible and preserved their hearts and have developed mature compassion for themselves and others. I hear it in their voices, by the way their breath reaches all the way down to their bellies. They were spared by grace, by luck, by some fate that salvaged them and called them to care for others.
I follow behind in my own car, no need to explain or advocate for my immunocompromise, it is accommodated as a matter of course. They have read all of the digital messages in bottles I have launched out into the world over the years. They know who I am, and all I have shared about what I have been through. We drive for hours, down narrow bumpy dirt roads, the sky growing both darker and brighter simultaneously as we leave the electric grid behind. We park. There are few tents pitched, a few RV’s parked around the far edge of a large circle lit by campfire and lantern. Some people are masked, some are not. Those who are not grant wide and respectful berth to those who are.
Some elders sit by a fire and tend it. I hang back in the shadows – observing, not ready to enter or identify myself. No one pressures me to come in closer or forces introductions. I am allowed to engage at my own pace.
It seems that no one here requires anything of me, or needs me to organize or facilitate anything. Nor am I required to supplicate or belittle myself through some infantilizing hazing as a newbie. I am allowed to be here exactly as I am, with all that I know and all that I do not know, all that I have, and all that I need.
The inner circle of elders tends the fire, and others are allowed to approach as individuals or clusters, to ask questions, engage in discussion. The elders appear to both give and receive something in these exchanges. There are people milling about, tending to the grounds, filling water bottles and cups with some warm beverage to chase off the chill of the night air, distributing blankets for those who need them and folding those no longer in use.
As I watch, I see there are various subgroups, side circles, whose boundaries are porous and overlapping. People circulate between them looking for a spot to settle or perhaps simply enjoying the full survey.
I approach, close enough to listen in but not call attention to myself. One man is speaking to others about anticipating the weather by watching the skies, plants, animals and stars. At the next nearby circle a non-binary person speaks of keeping seeds and answers questions about nurturing plants in challenging soil and climate. Yet another circle is talking about how to help the sick, suffering and dying manage pain. Another is structuring rituals and art pieces to help people grieve and support them in their mourning.
I wander toward another circle that speaks of the skills and strengths of those with neurodivergence and how we might operate as a community if we incorporated space for their way of being. Near a tree, a few dancers seem to be working out steps together in the flickering firelight. An off duty paramedic demonstrates improvisational first aid so that she is no longer the only keeper of that knowledge. A grandma shows some young people how to use a portable loom. One group sings a quiet song together. Another circle shares bedtime stories to people curled up on the ground with pillows and blankets.
I see three people sitting on the rocks near a large boulder. One is drawing something in the dirt with a stick. As I come closer, one man shifts over silently and instinctively to make room for me to sit as the conversation continues. I realize they are talking about their dreams and the stick is sketching out the terrain of a world that emerged during sleep. Images are explored. No conclusions are drawn.
As they break apart and flow away toward other things, I ask the man sitting next to me if he has time to answer some questions. No one is in any hurry, and one woman who was about to leave settles back down in case she can be of any help.
“Is this… I don’t know, some kind of field hospital? Some kind of school?” I ask.
“You could say that. ” the man replies. “We are all people who carry heavy responsibilities of one kind or another in our various communities and this is a space where we come together to rest and care for ourselves and each other. We share information. Offer what we can, rest when we need to, and mostly remember that we are not alone.”
“There doesn’t seem to be a central leader or membership requirements or any kind of give-get? No application? No imposed hierarchy?”
“No, we haven’t needed them. You come when you can, take what you need, share when you are able. Enough is demanded of us elsewhere. We regulate ourselves pretty well. We only come together once each season - so anything that grows among or out of our gatherings grows slowly, naturally.”
“There is nothing that I am expected to do in order to keep coming?”
“Nope!” he says lightly, “Later this year or next, if you want to, you are more than welcome to sit around the central fire and tells us how you came to be here and what you need to receive, and what you hope to give. If you ever feel led you can offer to respond to questions and share your skills and knowledge base – but its not needed or required. You are welcome to move in or out of any circle that soothes or appeals to you and get to know the gathering as slowly as you like. Some people just sit and listen for years and never say a word. Some roll up their sleeves and dive right in. Some never share their teachings because they have given all they can at home. Others feel refreshed enough, or have retired, and want to share.”
“This is strange for me to say, but something feels so different here. No one is holding forth? No one is jockeying for attention or position? No one is monopolizing. No one seems to be dismissed. I’ve never encountered a space like this.”
“Oh, we challenge and disagree with each other plenty – but there is no product or outcome we are moving toward, there are no conclusions to draw or decisions to make. We simply sit together to look at things from all sides - to sit with an image or an idea and let it unfold in all directions, to survey its implications, to allow questions to lead to more questions and be restored by them. We aren’t really looking for answers, so there is no prize to win, no last word to be had.”
“How do you bring people here?”
“We just watch. We look for people who keep serving their communities, usually in unconventional ways – outside of most institutions. We try to identify those who are offering up support but are unlikely to receive what they need back. We listen for the tired in their voice or words. We invite them here. Some don’t come. Some come and leave. Some come and return. It is all fine. No outcome is desirable or unfortunate.”
“Do people meet outside of the circles? In between gatherings?”
“No regulations about such things. Some find collaborators. There is no pressure to do so. Who you are here, how you engage, is up to you. We just try to create a space for those who need some refreshment, some re-creation. We only prepare the soil. What takes root, what grows, what bears fruit isn’t for us to determine or control.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As I write this, I know no such space is possible. Human beings bring their biases, their aggression, their lusts and hungers, their narcissistic injuries, their fear, wounds and greed everywhere they go. I know that if I encountered such a gathering in the world that it would not be as it is in this imaginal realm. That I would spend time feeling insufficient, and impatient, and outside – even in a space that seems designed for outsiders. I know that there will be personalities that chafe and annoy me, grinding my nerves. Some would lead discussions in directions that frustrate me and activate my resistance or willfulness. There would be people here more earnest, too corny, and less caustic than I am, and that would evoke shame in me for my sharp edges and inhibitions.
I also know that there would be those more skeptical and suspicious than I am even, and I would want to extricate myself away from their excessive negativity. Some would inevitably want more from me than I want to offer. Some will not want to give me what I hope for from them.
But, what if there could be a space where I was allowed to engage in the way that suits me? Allowed to wander off and walk away, to come and go and get to know people very slowly and over time and through my peripheral vision? That respected and appreciated “Sorry, no thanks!” whenever it is said kindly and clearly. Maybe I would be able to see their kindness alongside their cringe-evoking and brittle bits? Perhaps I would be less self-conscious about my own quirks, anxieties and awkwardness. Perhaps it would change me, heal me, allow some rest and ease? Maybe I could be carried by a community and not merely serve it?
I suspect that even if I were to return to this day dream I would bring a book or two, sit near the boulders with a blanket on my lap, a lantern by my side, reading and contemplating the stars, just watching the comings and goings of those around me. Even that would be enough.
Of course, this vision is silly and irrational and too good to be true in a million different ways. I yearn anyway: For a peaceable kingdom, for a beloved community.
I remain committed to withstanding such yearnings as the truest way to know who I really am, to encounter the work that remains unfinished, the hungers unmet, and to uncover my soul’s deepest desires.
I don’t know what good it does.
I yearn anyway.
