The Texture of Your Longing

New Moon of December: Posture Prompt

I am in a conversation with longing

because the space between here and there can be as small as an inchworm inching

or

as vast as a blackhole.

“Would it ever be enough?” she asks.

It hits me like a bucket of ice-water. Sober. Sobering. Sobered. Am I graspy? Are we all graspy? I often tell one of my children that she snuggles like a barnacle. In learning who she is, I realize that maybe that is me too. My reach is a serpentine wave rising out my throat, the flock of birds flapping in my chest, the thud of a burlap sack of earth in my center, roots growing out of my arms all the way to the tips of my fingers.

It’s okay to want connection, I repeat to myself. It’s okay to long both for union and for hard things to be different. It’s the human condition. Still. Still. Still. The still point. It’s there too. That noticing of what is already happening, what is already connected: the spoon that touched my husband’s lips this morning, the littered scraps of paper from a pre-bed kid art project, the unmade morning bed in the sun, the smells of horse and snow melting, the itchy sticky jangly feeling inside that cues me to listen, the small white ermin who peeked in the door at the three of us, the lit red candles to remind me of what is unfolding across oceans, the dog hair everywhere forever, the sharp taste of beet sauerkraut, the conversation with a heart friend while trying to get 5,000 steps in, the postmaster’s eyes as he tells me the postal system in this valley might not make it through December, my daughter’s fingers as she finds new sound on the guitar, the email from someone saying Thank you for doing this, the way she stayed next to me in the dark talking about middle-age and endings.

A small stool we use all the time, made by my husband's grandfather (a man he never met); a painting on our wall of the Grand Canyon by my second-mother landscape painter Susan Dabney; a glimpse of one month ("Metal") in The Loam 2024

Posture Prompt:

What is the texture of your longing? Literally. Many long from their torsos. But it’s different for everyone. If you were to imagine a person or place or desire that is out of reach, how does your body/soul/essence reach? We can avoid this sensation because it’s a lot. But can you feel into the felt-sense of it until it’s uncomfortable but tolerable? Then, pause, notice what else happens and switch gears.

Love,