Desire

I've been talking with my friends about how much I miss the feeling of desire when it leaves me, when I cannot identify anything that energizes me, pulls me forward. One friend agreed that she's aware of lack of desire, too, trying to notice it, identify it. Desire is, after all, such a powerful thing.

Though sexual desire is one element of desire, perhaps the first element people think of, what we're discovering is that we are seeking something different from that but just as elemental.

My friend Dana Knighton wrote: "My urgings are deeper these days, less physical, more a thing of spirit and soul than of flesh. The drivenness of my hormonal years is gone. In its place is a quieter, deeper longing, one that roots down into my veins and marrow. It has no name, it does not surge forward, pulling me behind it like a cart. Instead it sinks into me deep, like rainwater through loam, percolating down to the aquifer. I don't know where that blind stream runs, I don't know its source nor its end, I only know I feel it running through me quiet and strong."

Yes.

We are in the Lenten season, now, of course, and the promise of springtime and nature's new beginnings is growing all around us. Yesterday, Father Richard Rohr (http://cacradicalgrace.org/lenten/2011/) wrote about desire and new beginnings, how it is that "new beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die." Today Father Rohr writes, "In Isaiah 58:1-9a ... Isaiah makes a very upfront demand for social justice, non-aggression, taking our feet off the necks of the oppressed, sharing our bread with the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, letting go of our sense of entitlement, and not speaking maliciously."

In today's entry of his blog (http://earlsmichwat.blogspot.com) my friend Earl Morris writes of a time when he was approached by an apparently homeless family in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, and he gave them less than his wife was in the process of spending for ice cream. Only driving home, and onward, did he think about the comparison of amounts given and spent, about homeless families, people down on their luck in this tough, tough economy.

We know the statistics about the current inequity of wealth distribution in our country. Do we truly desire some redistribution in order to have the kind of world Isaiah describes? Who has the power to shift us toward what Isaiah suggests? The obvious answer is, together we do. The next question, with a far less obvious answer, is How?

I suggest it's one more movement that begins with desire in individual hearts. Recognized desire. First, know yourself, deeply know yourself. Identified emotional responses that may then be factored into rational, actionable responses. Not an easy path. How do we start? How?

I think it's the path that Jon Kabat-Zinn advocates, finding one's truest self in regular periods of quiet. Kabat-Zinn teaches a secular path to that inner quiet. (Others, ancient and modern and of every stripe, also recognize the same path as Kabat-Zinn takes, just the methods of teaching, the trappings, vary.) I suspect I'm preaching to the choir, here. Nevertheless.

What do you most deeply desire?