Desire, Fruits, Action, Rags of Love

For some time, as I emerged from a darkness of despair, I contemplated suffering and desire.

It is instructive that the word "suffer" means to allow, to allow what is. There is a tension between engagement with life, embracing it, and detachment. That which sets my heart singing -- can I host it without attachment? That which I love keeps my ego going, keeps me incarnated. The Bhagavad Gita most eloquently tries to resolve the tension. It prescribes action without attachment to the fruits of one's desires. Gandhi has written most profoundly on this, and claimed that the Gita was the center of his spiritual practice.

Gandhi tells us there must be action where there is body. But how are we to know how to act? By desireless action; by renouncing fruits of action; by dedicating all activities to God, according to Gandhi. But desirelessness or renunciation does not come from the mere talking about it. It is not attained by intellectual feats. In Gandhi's words, "it is attainable only by constant heart-churn....Learned men possess a knowledge of a kind. They may recite the Vedas from memory, yet they may be steeped in self-indulgence....devotion is not mere lip worship, it is a wrestling with death...It certainly is not blind faith. Gandhi also tells us devotion must not be "soft-heartedness, reading beads while disdaining to do a loving service."

And yet...as I reflect on this great man's struggles, my love of the teachings of Buddhism, of the wise and colorful stories of Hinduism such as Rama and Arjuna, a few days later a student sends me the following poem:

Why I Am Not A Buddhist
By Molly Peacock

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold—and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.

Yearning

I have been asked by several loyal readers when we would write again. Both Robert and I have been ill in different ways. I want to try to begin a dialogue again, and thank you for your patience.

Tonight my heart is dominated by yearning. The films of the great French director Francois Truffaut are filled with yearning. George Delarue wrote many of the soundtracks which speak the feeling language of music to accompany the bittersweet images created by this most tender of film makers. If you have not seen Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Bed and Board, Stolen Kisses, The Man Who Loved Women, Shoot the Piano Player -- you owe it to yourself.

What is this yearning? Our desire to be met, to be held, to be truly seen but not controlled. The fragility of life, which stubbornly endures despite all heartache and impossibilities. The humor, the arrows of eros. There is something tragically endearing in that. Freud and Jung used a clumsy psychological term, libido. Freud related it to a sexual "instinct" but Jung was closer in describing a life energy, the pulse of nature, or of God stretching out to explore and create. Perhaps yearning is what quickens the pulse and moves the green stem toward the light. In therapy one must always look for the yearning, how it has become blocked or limited. If I can help someone touch some aspect of their yearning, we can get things moving again. One can live on a diet of duty for years, but it is yearning that makes life worth living.

Woody Allen once joked about a relative who thought he was a chicken. When asked why they didn't get the poor man help, Woody replied, "We need the eggs." We all need the eggs. We need to share our yearnings and have them honored, even when they are perhaps illusory. Otherwise life is flat and two-dimensional. A fool who pursues his illusions becomes wise. Life is simultaneously absurd and a miracle, ridiculous and filled with awe and beauty. Without yearnings I am serenely indifferent, cut off, lonely.