Last night I was at the local church listening to the choir. I found myself being unexpectedly moved by the chorus of voices emanating a kind of communion with holy. The song about Mary birthing her son, Jesus, had me weeping, along with the song about a wishing well of love. 

During one of the songs a spoken word poet took the mic and her last line was this:

“There is so much love can dance us toward if we allow our longing to lead”

 – Harula Ladd

This line captures the essence of my own poetry and knowing, as one who has explored the full range of longing’s promise, from the starry heights to the underworld depths and know them both as the invitation into ecstasy. 

For years I have danced with this phenomenon of longing. It seemed to be an immense source of pain. Rattling like a derelict shack in the chamber of my own heart, when my longing was evoked, it most certainly bought with the temptation to fall into a feeling of lack or incompleteness, rousing the hungry ghost within my won unfelt pain body. 

Until I learnt to turn towards it. 

To let the full force of my longing become me. 

I let it show me.

I held it.

I listened to it.

I cradled it.

I worshipped it.

I wrote my finest poems from it.

I have been slayed by it.

I’ve been torn open by it. 

I’ve orgasmed from it.

I’ve moved countries because of it.

I’ve dedicated my life to her whisper..

Because here is the thing, all your longing wants it to take you to the depths of your love.

And you can only know that love if you’re willing to descend, all the way down, to meet the truth of your longing. 

At the beginning that can feel like you are going to the hell realms but as you allow the truth to your longing in, you’ll see that your willingness to die to that force is simply opening up all of the places that have been closed down to love.

The question is can you let your ego die time and time again to know this love? Are you willing to let the force of the love shape you beyond the confines of your comfort zone? To take you all the way to the core of who you truly are?

Your longing isn’t an inconvenient accident. Your longing is the truth of your life trying to make its’f manifest through you. It’s a holy force of nature that resides within you, beckoning you back to the primordial ecstasy of being in holy communion with life. 

To swirl in abandon is the ways of the prophets and poets and mad men. 

Sometimes that doesn’t look pretty. It doesn’t look like Disney or even happily ever after all the time.  Sometimes the arrow of our longing isn’t the thing that will compete us, but the giving ourselves to where our longing wants to take us will. 

Your longing might destroy you first. The too-small you, because your longing wants you to live your love. You longing wants you to come to know the divine force that moves you. You longing will have you meet all the places of your need, your wanting, your attachment, your shadow, your unfelt wounds and require that you alchemise and let go, again and again and again, until there is nothing else left of you but the raw core of you. Until you become your longing. The one moved by the grace of her heart cracked so wide of open to life, she can let the world in. 

Love is the dance. Our longing the guide.

So only one question remains, will you let your longing dance you?