Yearning
“Where
does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are
fed, yet hunger gnaws at you. You have been loved, but your yearning
wanders in new fields. And to prod all these, there's time, the
Bastard Time.”
John
Steinbeck
In
his autobiography, Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote
that once “a great princess,” when told the peasants were
starving because they had no bread, replied, “Let them eat cake!”
The phrase was attributed to Marie Antoinette to illustrate her utter
disregard for the poor, but in truth, it was about Rousseau's
yearning for brioche to go with the wine he had stolen! We're all
yearning for something, I guess.
In
fact, yearning is so much a part of the human condition that one has
to stop and ponder it for a moment. It doesn't matter who you are, or
how much you have, there is always a burning desire for something
more, something different, something new. It drives us and makes us
restless. When we're poor, its the yearning for basic necessities of
food, clothing and shelter, clean air and clean water. But once those
are provided, the yearning doesn't stop. It becomes yearning for more
status, to move up the ladder. And then there's the ever-present
longing for the ideal soul-mate, that shows up even when we already
have a perfectly good partner. We are a species who tries to buy our
way out of yearning—clothes, cars, toys, houses, furnishings,
jewels, drugs, alcohol—you name it. We are always adding “stuff”
in our attempts to satisfy that lonely gnawing in the gut.
What
if we knew that all craving represents a deep and powerful desire for
union with one's lost self? We know at our core that Soul is involved
because it's never satisfied with anything superficial. But getting
to it is a whole other order of business. The image in my mind is
climbing a very tall ladder out of a deep pit in the earth. We can
see the light at the top, but we're never certain that we're getting
closer. This is the way the Soul calls to us to keep climbing—“Keep
yearning, keep looking for me,” it says, “You won't find me in
all these shiny objects or dark spirits. You will only find me by looking in.” As
long as our craving keeps us looking outside ourselves for
replacement parts, we will never find the union we're seeking. It's
inside, sitting by a toasty fire with a nice cup of tea, waiting for
us to show up.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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