Longing part 2

Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. Thanks for dropping by, it's good to have you here.

Last week I began a side-quest in my series on the Imaginal Realm, an expedition into the territory of Longing, with my poem of the same name taking up most of the post. It feels right this week to continue traversing that terrain of longing, as so much seems left to be explored.

It's also an excuse to share some more poems, because when I look back at the last decade's worth of poetic material I have created, longing seems to be one of the stronger recurring themes - though it is oftentimes the feeling of the poem as much as the content.

So let's begin with one from 2016. I rarely go back this far with my poems nowadays. There was something of a step-change in my poetic output in 2017, a year in which I undertook a daily writing practice and blogged three poems a week for the whole twelve months, and began mining my subconscious in ways that I hadn't previously been able to access. I don't really relate to much that I wrote before that year any more; but there are the occasional pieces that still seem to have some life in them.

This one, Forlornness, I dug out of a long-neglected folder while searching for something else, and was surprised to find it. I vaguely remember its existence, but can't recall anything about the process of writing it. It carries the tone of pieces that I wrote in the early mornings, back when early mornings were still a time of joyful waking solitude for me, and not a time of either necessary sleep or being horrified-to-be-awake-and-feeling-like-shit. Here it is:

Forlornness

Even though it is dark outside, I know I will find you.
You are the path.
You are the jagged thorn bushes alongside the path.
You are the lonesome call from an unseen bird, piercing the deep silence.
You surround me in infinite forms.
You are within every atom of my being.

My pulse ticks off each heartbeat with implausible regularity.
Concealed miles of interior pipework surge faithfully,
delivering a precious payload to my furthest reaches;
enabling me, even now, to have this very thought.

While captivated by the marvel that is my own existence,
I am stricken, too, by forlornness.
One small hole
in one small piece of fleshy tubing
and it’s all over.
I feel more fragile than the flimsy webs I brush past in the undergrowth.
I forge deeper into the unknown,
separated from death by what?
A millimetre of delicate tissue,
some skin and a little padding?
I could fall on a broken branch with fatal consequences.
The thought halts me in my tracks.

A bluish tinge appears where sky meets land,
bringing ghostly silhouettes into being.
Finite. I feel so very finite.
What am I doing out here anyway?
I could be a surgeon, saving someone’s life, right at this moment.
I could be conjuring up cures for cancer, ending malnutrition,
or educating children about species on the verge of extinction.
Instead I am wandering through wasteland, tearing myself on thorns,
looking for something I believe I already possess.
The actions of a madman?
Or the lucid methodology of somebody
practicing freedom from empire?

My uncertainty trips me up, scolds me.
Do saints doubt their beliefs?
Do martyrs contest the clarity of their convictions? 
Of course they do. It qualifies them for the role.

A rose hue filters into the lower reaches of the heavens
lifting my soul from within.
It is inexpressibly beautiful, to the point of physical pain.
I am one with the pinkness, the thorns, the unseen bird.
Breathing in deeply, I take another step into
morning’s restrained magnificence. 

This poem is unusual in that, even now, it still gives my heart a pang when I read it. One aspect of this is the feeling that I described my own future. It's an accurate description of my practice at Pomona, with the exception of the time of day and the use of the word wasteland. A word that those who know me will know I detest as a descriptor of any wild space. If you want to see a waste of land, go look at a shopping mall, a construction site, or a golf course.

But even though I've inhabited the life I've depicted in the poem, the same ache of longing inhabits my heart. Why is this? There were so many things I deeply longed to escape when I wrote this poem, and the reality is that I've gained liberation from them all. Yet the heart still yearns. I attribute this to the notion articulated in last week's post by Stephen Jenkinson: longing doesn't try to kid us that it will ever be fulfilled. It exists to remind us that we are alive, and that life is awe-inspiring, and that there is always More to be felt and known and experienced.

There's real sweetness and joy in this sensation. But these feelings have companions: sadness, grief, heartache. It's bittersweet. This is where I turn to a remarkable expounder of theopoetics, Rubem A Alves, whose book The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet I first read in the summer of that same year, 2016. Here Alves writes about beauty:

If one wants the supreme joy of beauty, one must be prepared to cry. Sadness is not an intruder in beauty’s domains. It is rather the air without which it dies… Beauty is sad because beauty is longing. The soul returns to one’s lost home. And the return to the ‘no longer’ is always painful. The sunset, the blue skies, the sonata: they are there, but they are not our possession. Elusive like the sunset, the blue skies, the sonata, beauty touches us and quickly goes leaving only nostalgia in its place…

Sunset is beautiful because its colours are ephemeral and in a few minutes will cease to be. The sonata is beautiful because its life is short.

Everything that is perfect asks to die. After death, the poem becomes silence—emptiness. Then something else will be born in its place: longing. Longing only flourishes in absence.

Ephemeral Beauty

Longing only flourishes in absence. There. It. All. Is.

Alves builds a beautiful and convincing argument that our longing points us to a forgotten Eden, a time and place we yearn to return to. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that our longing actually points us directly to Here and to Now - to a depth of connection with self, others, land, creatures and the divine that we have long forgotten and neglected; that we have become hoodwinked into believing we are separated from. Because the more I anchor myself in these connections, the more the longing in my soul becomes a bearable reminder rather than an unbearable burden. Indeed, Alves himself says in the same book:

Stories have power only because their past and distance are metaphors for the here and now.

Memories:

Let us turn now to some of the sources of longing. As well as the experiences and poems which trigger that bittersweet state, memories can also propel us into longing. I have a few that are powerful on this front, and I suspect you have yours too. Here are a couple of mine, unnecessarily related back to myself in the second person:

Remember that week in St. Ives, when your family and your best friend's family holidayed together in the same cottage? The kids were young and the days were long and pleasantly hot and we either sat on the beach for hours - all the beaches had huts serving fresh coffee! - or walked up the hill to the park, or to the swimming pool where the kids played endlessly in the small pool with its slide into the water. And you sat in a pub with beer that tasted of summer heaven poured into a glass. And you found “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in Oxfam Books and sat reading it in the window seat with a huge grin on your face as the language massaged your brain into a state of ecstasy. And later you and your best mate chatted in the kitchen and you finally realised, at the age of 34, that you had long stopped doing the thing you loved most as a child - writing - and you committed to starting again and to making space for it every week, and it felt like rediscovering a lost continent.

Beloved Window Seat

Here's another:

Remember that time during lockdown, when you were slowly exploring little corners of woodland tucked alongside the Mersey, and it was a perfect late spring afternoon and you had nothing to rush home for that day? You entered a small clearing, and someone had made some kind of hanging charm or mobile out of thread and natural materials, and suddenly everything felt magical, and time did a weird thing and slowed to treacle like you'd fallen into another dimension for a while, and you were full of wonder. And try as you might you could never find that clearing or that mobile again, and maybe it just doesn't live in the same plane of existence you walk most of the time…

You'll have your own version of these memories, I'm sure, ones that inhabit a special place in the body, mind and emotions, and evoke a sense of nostalgia that is both protected from corruption by a powerful forcefield, yet also completely unreachable due to that same temporal barrier.

Dreams:

Another occasionally rich source of material to fuel our longing is our dream life. Do you ever have those dreams about a place that feels so deeply familiar, but you don't think you've even been there in your waking life? A place that feels like a kind of home, that's closer than your skin, yet is somehow intangibly distant? I know I do. I can't ever control or predict when I'll visit these places in a dream, but on the rare occasions that I do, they always elicit the same feelings. One of my dream places is a meadow. It's vexingly difficult to remember much detail when I awake from visiting it, because it is the emotional impact that dominates, and those emotions are laden with longing. But here's a poem I wrote to attempt to capture just a tiny fraction of my dream meadow.

The Meadow

There is a meadow, somewhere,
that evokes feelings I have no names for, 
and a longing, a heartache, 
for something I cannot bring to mind. 

I don't know if I have been to this place
in my waking life, or solely in dreams.
I can picture it, but only in fragments, 
never the whole that I wish to see.

I know that the land slopes gently, 
that there are paths around its edges, 
long grasses and wildflowers all over, 
and a pond hidden in its heart. 

It is not merely the meadow itself
that induces my intangible yearning;
but also knowing there are two roads home,
and that the longer one holds wonder.

I remember less of this longer route home 
than I do of the meadow itself; 
but once I've discovered its magic 
I know it's the only way I will ever take. 

Like all paths, for me, this dram one leads me back to Pomona. Because though she is very real and just up the road, and though she is surrounded by the noise and grime and bustle of a city deep in the process of eating itself alive through greed, she has been the source of countless encounters with creatures and with mystery that have brought the fulfilment of longing so much closer to home. As close as it gets to fulfilment anyway!

And while longing does not go away entirely, I do feel that, once we realise in our very bones that we are not separate from anything else on this Earth, and once we make every effort to keep that connection alive and fed, it does seem to diminish in potency somewhat.

To immediately counter this: I'm writing this next portion having just arrived back home from a visit to Pomona. It was an occasion where I didn't feel any of that deep connection or magic. Sure, it was lovely to sit in the sun, though the wind was cold. It felt like an act of fidelity to say my Remembrances and Blessings, to feed the swans, to greet the crows. But there were no encounters of special depth, or moments of rapture. The visit I made before this was similarly lacking in wonder. This, I realised as I turned to walk home, this is when the longing strengthens its grip. Oh for those times when everything shimmers, when every creature feels full of relevant, symbolic meaning, when uncontrollable events open me up to wonder…

A day when everything shimmered

But. I know these things will happen again, as surely as night follows day, as surely as summer follows spring. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes weeks. But if I keep going back, I'll get the magic once again, and I'll learn something along the way. And in this act, it seems, the combination of longing and fidelity co-create a kind of container, which from time to time, grace may fill to overflowing.

I wrote a poem on this subject earlier this year, and published it in my recent poetry zine, The Imaginal Commons, which I'm giving away to anyone who'll take it, free of charge, including postage. Recipients include some of you lovely readers. If you're staring at this thinking “well, I haven't got one!” then I can only encourage you to drop me a message, and I shall change that reality for you. Supplies are running low, but there are still some copies left, so please don't be shy about it. I want to you to have it! I am desperate to liberate my poetry from capitalism!

Anyway, two different friends who have read the zine have contacted me about this particular poem, and how it supported them in working through some difficult issues and emotions. So it feels doubly apt to share it here today:

The Grace Paradox

There is a grief,
a deep grief, always present,
at the lack of what was not given,
at the absence of connection.

Beneath the ocean of grief
is the bedrock of longing;
and into a life shaped by these forces
enters a strange grace.

It is this grace that reveals
what is longed for, this grace
that allows all that was withheld
to flow freely through your life.

This strange grace is
always a gift, always freely given.
The cost comes as you offer it out:
the price is your whole life.

The heart-rending joy
that arrives through the ways of grace
will always meet the longing and
will always deepen the longing.

Though the longing is never sated,
the taste of grace is so sweet
in all its relational shapes,
that it is always enough.

So long as grace is extended
and shared with the kin of all beings,
creating a channel to flow in,
it will always stream freely.

So long as the grace flows in
and out of your life,
meeting and making the longing,
you will always agree to the cost.

It's hard to put my thoughts and feelings about all this together in a way that's any clearer than the poem to be honest. Sometimes poetry is my best shot at articulating a complex subject. But, in my experience, there's definitely some kind of close-knit and universal connection between grief and longing, fidelity and grace. They all seem to need each other, somehow, if there's to be a sense of meaningful flow created in life. And though the longing is never satisfied to the point of leaving us, nevertheless it seems to loosen its grip when held in the flow of grace. I'm going to stop trying to articulate all this any better, as it's not going to happen, today at least! But please drop a comment if any of this resonates with you.

Meanwhile, I'm going to draw this post to a close with news from another creative front. For the last couple of weeks I have been editing and designing more poetry zines! I’ve written a great many poems over the last five years, and have struggled to find any way to put them in order, until now. It seems that the process of making The Imaginal Commons has enabled me to see how other work can fit together into short collections, and has unleashed a flow of activity towards that end. So, you heard it here first: the next three poetry zines from me will be The Physical Body, The Emotional Body and The Relational Body. I will try to restrain myself and release them into the world one at a time. Or maybe they should come as a set of three? Your opinions in the comments, please!

So for now, thanks for reading, I hope that something in today's post has stirred a thought or a feeling, a dream or a memory in you. Or maybe even sparked a new thought. If so, I would love to hear about those in the comments too!