Desire as a Divine Ingredient in a Fully-Lived Life
On finding radical wellness in the midst of illness, dancing with desire, and a sumptuous feast for the senses in San Francisco
When your deep fear has found you,
a yellow sunflower will grow
beside you on the dunghill.
You will be astonished
as it turns to face you.
It will marvel as fire
comes to eat from
your hand.
–Moineddin Jablonski
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Discovering Radical Wellness
This week, I shared how my healing journey is going on the GoFundMe page to support that journey. It’s been truly miraculous. Not in terms of physical healing yet, but what’s transforming in my inner landscape.
One of the things I’ve been diving into to support my healing is doing Qigong movements and meditations daily. This is new for me. And I have to say that the excellent training I’m getting through the Five Elements Self-Healing Course from Spring Forest Qigong is one major factor why, as I wrote on my GoFundMe, “I am dwelling in peace, joy, and positivity most of the time. And so many old limiting patterns have largely melted away.”
I’ve been so extraordinarily well and happy overall, while dealing with a terminal diagnosis and daily physical pain and limitations, that I hardly recognize myself. It’s hard not to think this will result in physical healing. Yet, I know it may not. I know this may be my last year in this body. Or I may have many more years.
So, I make the most of the time I have. I focus on joy, delight, pleasure, making art, doing what I love, and attending to the small moments of my life.
I live with as much Outrageous Openness to what is as I can muster. I realize now, as I write this, that I told you about discovering and ordering the book by that name, but I haven’t written about reading and applying it in my life. I’ll aim to do that next week. Because this week, I want to talk about desire.
Dancing with Desire
Buddhist teachings say desire is the root of suffering. But that’s not the whole story. Clinging to our desires does cause suffering. Needing things to go a certain way, according to the ego’s details. This brings pain.
On the other hand, feminine embodiment practices, which are making a huge and needed comeback in our world today, teach us that desire is the vital element that brings all life into being. How else do species continue? How else are we moved to feed ourselves, build our homes, create our inventions, form deep relationships with others? Or reach for the big dreams that cause us to grow in our gifts and aliveness, even though they scare us?
Desire begins them all. Guides them all. Which suggests to me that desire itself is Divine. Desire is embedded in us by Life itself. And certain desires—our heart’s dreams, our soul’s callings (not our ego’s endless demands)—have a divine origin, are meant to call us to the fullness of who we are. My favorite of “The Basic Principles” in The Artist’s Way states: Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.”
Also, desire is our offering to the Divine, our prayer, what we put on the altar, how we show up in the dance. It’s how we risk and dare to be alive. It’s our part in the play. Even enlightened beings such as Paramahansa Yogananda and Byron Katie are highly active in creating things—programs, institutions, world tours. They don’t simply sit on the couch and allow whatever happens to happen.
So then, it’s not desire but attachment that’s the problem. Desire without clinging is a recipe for a fulfilled life, a beautiful life, a life of deep participation (as I wrote about here.)
Oh, but how hard that can be! To want something deeply but not need it to go a particular way. To offer my beautiful longing, caring, and participation, and then let go and let God.
For instance, I want to be healed completely. To bring that about, I need to believe in the possibility of it, take ongoing action toward it, even help imagine and call it into being. But do it all lightly, playfully, as a game.
And I need to let go of needing healing to happen in a certain way or time. Perhaps this body will be healed completely, perhaps only the mind and heart. I need to turn it over to the Divine while staying in the dance. Otherwise, I suffer.
This is not easy. I can flip-flop between resignation and striving, fear and hope. But more and more, I dwell in blessed states of acceptance and delight. Being with what is. Allowing myself to take the next right step. Do the next joyful thing. Open to the next bit of guidance. Attune to the next longing of my heart and send a loving call for it out into the Universe.
Weekly Wonders
Nearly everything seems to be a wonder to me these days. But I want to share a little of the utterly miraculous time Don and I had celebrating our ninth wedding anniversary this past weekend in San Francisco. It was an absolute feast of aural, visual, and culinary delights.
After a delicious sushi dinner, we got to hear the San Francisco Symphony performing Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. And then, Hilary Hahn joined them for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, a piece we adore.
The utter mastery of Hahn, Salonen, and the orchestra, of Beethoven’s compositions, combined with the extraordinary acoustics of Davies Symphony Hall, transported me. Hilary Hahn can produce sounds as delicate as lace filigree, as fluid as a mountain stream, and as moving as a child’s cry, all with a technical proficiency that is downright eerie. I was entranced. The audience brought her back six times with our applause, and she graced us with two gorgeous encores.
This was one of the top performances I have attended in my life.
The next day, we went to the Museum of Modern Art and gorged on so many exhibits I can’t begin to recount them all. I had to sit down frequently to manage my body’s pains, but was amazed and utterly grateful I could be there.
Most incredible perhaps was a video installation by Ragnar Kjartansson called The Visitors. You enter a darkened room where you are surrounded by large screens, each picturing a room in an old Victorian house in the Hudson Valley of New York. In each room, a musician is playing. They are synced up by headphones to the others, so that they are all playing together, creating this sweet, hour-long, dreamlike song. As you walk past each screen, that performer sounds closer. The effect was magical and quite uplifting and hopeful.
That night, we had our anniversary dinner at The Greens Restaurant, one of my favorite places.
Sunday, we had hoped to go to the botanical gardens, but I had to rest and deal with some belly pain. We did get to wander in a few wonderful shops in Japantown, where we were staying, and have a delicious Vietnamese lunch before heading home. And I bought a watercolor workbook to help me paint more birds!
I felt utterly sated and blessed by the whole weekend.
Even so, I felt strangely called to go back in just two weeks to hear the orchestra perform Mahler’s Second Symphony. It’s a piece I loved as a music major in college. It seemed absurd to go back so soon. We had certainly splurged all we could on our anniversary weekend, but I put out a call on my Creative Sparks newsletter, asking if anyone had connections to get us tickets and/or a place we could stay overnight in the Bay Area on June 14. And then, I let go. If it’s meant to happen, it will happen. If not, it’s fine.
Almost immediately, I received a gift of the tickets from one friend and an offer of a place to stay in Vallejo, 45 minutes away, from a student. What?!!! Amazing.
This has been a longer post. If you made it through, thank you! If you liked it, please click on the heart button and consider sharing it with a friend. And now, for this week’s Wonder Sparks to help you cultivate a little more magic in your life.