Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Jung
Interestingly, our personal shadows don't reveal themselves when we are bathed in contented light. Rather, they loom large when we find ourselves visited by darkness. It is in the discomfort of darkness where our desires form and envelope us until we are forced to acknowledge them.
Or not. Some people never acknowledge their true wishes. They will live a life trying to maintain a homestatic blandness, a tight sphinctered repressiveness of thought control. I pity them because they are basically getting through life without the taste of it.....without inhaling the freshness of a new day.........without quenching the thirst and hunger of passionate living.
Desires disturb our sleep with chain rattling discomfort and manifest themselves as seemingly unreachable visions of longing. It is a longing fed by our sensations that drive our quest to satisfy our appetites....our cravings.
They loom on the shores of our personal destinations. They make us put one foot in front of the other. Sometimes attainable and yet sometimes forever beyond our fingertips.......beyond reality. They remain in an illusory cloud hovering state, dreaming temptations of forbidden fare, searing heat, bitter cold unfulfillment. We are driven by our desires, motivated to reach out beyond our cocooned safety in order to climb our next summit. It is a fire in the belly feeling.......which pushes us into the arms of awareness.
Shadowed desires can be cloaked as both positive and negative. They are formed by our unresolved and unfulfilled parts of who you are. Given that we all have in us good and evil, love and hate, greed and generosity, wants and needs, our desires may clash with magnetically strong sirens. They form our internal conflict. They force us to wrestle with God. They can push us down onto our knees in prayer. Desires strike at the core of temptation.
What is the real purpose behind our ability to desire deeply when they can lead us to both anguish and ecstasy? Why were we born with such strongly fueled passion if it often leads us to the shore of tempation? Perhaps it is desire which offers us the reason for the journey. If we didn't have this fuel, we would never leave the cocoon. We would never seek out a new signpost for discovery. We would never question, ponder, dream, aspire, want, crave, envision, create, reach out for...... Our "will" would fade away to an apparition of used to be...... Without desire, there would be no passion in creating new life....
Desire more than you can ever achieve.
Awaken the stirrings.
Desire is the cord attaching our feelings to our soul.
Love like you've never been hurt.
This week's prompt at Writer's Island is "desire".......a quenching delectable stirring thought. To read more desirous posts, check out this site........
18 comments:
Beautiful Dana. I relate to so much of this its like you are inside my head. It is good to have desires but not if it prevents us from having a fulfilling life. While we are longing and yearning for that something we know with certainty we can never have we stop REALLY living. We stand still, marking time, waiting for...WHAT? Something that can never be.... That is just sad and a waste of all the emotion it evokes.
Desire is a wondrous emotion that can bring us to the ultimate pinnacle of emotion but if not based in reality, it can take you to the depths of despair. I have experienced both and I will never ever allow myself to feel the latter ever again. Whew, that really needed to come again. Sorry Dana, this is a very touchy subject for me.
Sorry I meant to say that really needed to come OUT, not again. Oops.
It is a touchy subject for all of us I think........we can get swept away in our illusory desires can't we.......? it's that tension between illusion and reality we all try balance.
hey, and great Freudian slip there gypsy! love it.
Wonderful piece, well written, with excellent depth of thought... bravo! ;)
I was literally looking at that Jung quote this morning going: "yes!" This is so beautifully written.
I find the calling of true desire heart achingly wonderful. Yet, for me, it's sticking to it - not getting distracted or tempted by the furies of life - that is the challenge. Gratefully, I know that.
Poor Gypsy. I feel like the depths of despair come to me in ways I cannot fathom - death of my beloved bunny, my father's death which destroyed my family, my mil's cruelty, etc - so I may as well follow my hearts desire. Despair is coming either way! ;)
excellent, excellent post. and i love your use of words..."homestatic blandness, a tight sphinctered repressiveness..." WOW!
Dana,
Your passion comes across loud and clear in this writing. I love what you wrote and how you elequently used words to convey your thougts. I am still working through thoughts on duality, howeve I completly understand what you are saying Great post! Great writing.
Rob...thank you. I have yet to check out the other blogs and will do tonight. It's a prompt that is quite wide ranging isn't it?
Claudia....now that's synchronistic as Jung would say. ;) I like this quote a lot....
Despair does manage to wend its way into our lives more than enough. You're right.........grab hearts desires by the heartstrings and fly with it.
Rebecca...thank you....it seemed like such a freudian thing to write.....but i liked how it tripped off my thoughts and fingertips... :)
Mark...thankyou. I wanted to write it with a sense of urgency, as our desires tend to make us feel. I had written a piece a while back on "discomfort" and was thinking of that piece when I wrote this one. Interesting how sometimes our desires lead us to a strong feeling of discomfort....often when it clashes with our believes and way of life, perhaps.
I liked the ending like, love like you naver been hurt.. I guess very true
oh what another mavellous piece about desire. I surely desire more than I can ever achieve and although it is a fuel it is surely also the reason for mourning because "you can't always have what you want"
So much I wanted to say has already been said so I'll just thank you for a really enjoyable read
have enjoyed your post on so many levels.... nodding my head...shaking my head... pondering... the will and desire...which is it that comes first...
Enjoyed your post immensely but I'm truly enamored with the photos!!
rambler....sometimes our biggest hurts have come from vulnerably sharing our love.....it can shut us down and make us weary of loving again. I like the line too (which is from a larger quote) because it's important to keep feeling love no matter what we have been through. It is love that will heal our hurts again. That's what I think anyways....or at least that's what I'm thinking today. Tomorrow, who the heck knows?
Marja....interesting how desire is a major ingredient in all of the biggie emotions, eh?
Keith...thankyou. i'm pleased you enjoyed the read. it was fun to try to capture the essence of how I view desire too.
Little.....what a great question. I honestly don't know and will have to chew on that for a bit. maybe they are one in the same?
Sue...thank you. I took the apple pic a couple of months ago in my kitchen when I was supposed to be putting the groceries away! the light hit them at the right angle and I left the rest of the groceries and started shooting.
The Lily is a part of a bouquet I received from my husband last weekend......I found the colour and the pic phallic. :)
Brilliant post, Dana. So right that we must look within, rather than always dreaming. xo
thanks Tara......i'm beginning to think that i write my best stuff in the dead of night. this is the second post recently that i wrote as a way to push through a bout of insomnia! I think maybe I'll go to bed now and set my alarm for 3 am......and see what happens! :)
Well written, the Castle is just around the corner - keep looking.
Lots of love, David
David...i'm so please to "see" you. It feels like the castle is just around the corner. the search continues. I just wish someone used confetti instead of bread crumbs. the birds ate the evidence. perhaps the hoot owls were responsible? ;)
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