Longing

LONGING has its own secret future destination, and its own seasonal emergence from within, a ripening from the core, a seed growing in our own bodies; it is as if we are put into relationship with an enormous distance inside us leading back to some unknown origin and with its own secret timing, indifferent to our wills, and at the same time, outwardly, an intimate sense of proximity, to a lover, to a future, to a transformation, to a life we want for ourselves; to the beauty of the sky and the need for a new ground beneath it. Longing is nothing without its dangerous edge, that cuts and wounds us while setting us free and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril; The foundational instinct is that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world; that we are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all the odds. In longing we move and are moving from a known but abstracted elsewhere, to a beautiful, about to be reached, someone, something or somewhere we want to call our own. © David Whyte: from Readers' Circle Essay, "Longing" 2011

Photo © DW 2014 : Paris: Winter Sky.