Ah, February has entered 2024 with it's symbol of and messages of love. But before fulfillment, the story of love is often the story of longing. As I write this, L.A. county and coastal California is under constant weather warnings on an upcoming, destructive storm that I'm sure has stirred a collective longing for "simpler times" before the age of Climate Change. There is a haunting kind of human longing that we cannot always name, that causes the mind to reach for what it does know, to understand and find fulfillment for an unnamed desire. We understand the world in categories, defined by naming. Sometimes we gain further insight from other languages, like the German word Sehnsucht which carries a shade of yearning that goes beyond the English form. It expresses a more obsessive pull for a fulfillment beyond the reach of right now. It may be for relationship, or for a particular person, or place, or even time. We feel incomplete; the richness of life is incomplete. It isn't just the pain of missing someone or something, because with it comes the element of times of past happiness and the possibility or potentiality of fulfillment in the future, but right now, it is not there. Instead, there is sadness, melancholy, and longing all mixed in.
Many philosophical and spiritual writers have have pursued the theme of Sehnsucht and it's relationship to the Unknown and perhaps, Unknowable. It is possible that our heartaches of love and our happy moments of connection--in all forms--are ultimately but rungs or shadowy mirrors of awareness of our true being: we are aspects of the Source of All. The English word "belonging" holds that root "longing" and gives us a clue that longing is in the pull to belong. Modern commercialism and social media exploit the human need to belong by bridging the gap, offering toys, clothes, life-styles, behaviors that define us as belonging. They use the power of sensory stimulation and modeling to create longing for specific commercial products in the exploitation of human longing for cultural belonging. It cannot satisfy the underlying pull to awakening, to realization of our enfoldment in the Unity of Life. We are led by THAT longing.
Today I encourage you to a new awareness of your own longings and the layers of meaning they hold for you. When I look backward as this storm approaches here, I remember the frequent storms on the Gulf Coast where I grew up in Houston. There were radio and TV warnings and devastation along the beaches; there was also excitement and wading in the streets, as we literally watched boats float by in the flooded boulevard. All this was the Way of Life then. I feel no need to return to it. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that through literature, "You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong." In 2024, we have so many additional ways to communicate universal longings that re-enforce an awareness that we ALL belong. The Way of Life now meets us as new forms, new knowledge, new pressure to move forward, not back--in union, not-conflict and one upmanship. Let that longing pull you forward into the unfolding, creative belonging that is Love. To Be is to belong here. (Susan Nettleton)
As Larry Morris wrote in his poem "Love's Barrier":
... and where is the Love in all this?
Mirabai would say,
your longing is for the Love
and that Love is in the longing itself.
Love dissolves the self
better than anything."
Further thoughts: https://yourmindfultribe.org/.../jiisw4jleqkp6goup5jeoz3e...