morning fog over river.“It’s not always obvious when a person is yearning. Yearning is an exquisitely private or secret condition. What is yearned is true. To yearn is to see. Yearning is the natural remedy for discontent, agitation, non-specific grievance, prickly sensibility, and similar modern ailments. Yearning is a well-tended hope which has ripened slowly into a sweet, sensuous prayer. Yearning brings poise to the imagination, a pleasant momentum to consciousness, and an angel who plays a lute which drowns out the sound of the traffic. Yearning lifts you up out of the courtroom, away from the judge, the police, the lawyers and the witnesses against you. It raises you out through the window and up into the sunshine and the beautiful blue sky”
Michael Leunig
It makes me wonder whether yearnings remain so until one expresses them openly..........until the words are found so that they can be shared with another? Or should we keep our yearnings secret as an internal motivator to be self directed in our actions?
thank you katie for sending me this wonderful quote.........i just had to share ........... see you soon!!
10 comments:
Great quote.
pleased you liked it :)
to expose our yearnings is perhaps to expose the most vulnerable part of us... just read your consenting post...
do we give our yearnings wings by letting them free and sharing them?
I do think that they can be self motivating and sometimes they maybe have a stronger effect when they are trapped inside...but they can almost hurt more when they are kept inside..
I like that they can raise you out of the window and up into the sunshine and the beautiful blue sky - perhaps to ride on a rainbow to the pot of gold at the end, to our dreams...
yes, see you sooon! looking forward to it
daisy....i really like it too.......the descriptiveness suits my thinking to a tee.
Katie....i agree....if you can find the courage to expose those yearnings, the vulnerability may be stroked in a way that makes one feel so accepted. It does seem to fit with my previous post.
the last thing i want to do is to get to the end of my life and feel like i have held back a dream that i should've acted on. yes....a ride on a rainbow is a wonderful analogy.......i can picture it now.
Hi Dana
I have a new url as I'm going through some changes and really needed to 'leave' some of me behind - I hope that doesn't sound too crazy!
Please drop by and say Hi sometime.
love Julie x
I love the photo that you have with this post. It reminds me of prayer rising up to God and how our yearnings really are our lives of prayer. I find the liturgy most meaningful when my yearning actually matches up with what i am saying and helps express the longings of my heart.
I think bloggers often wrestle with how much they choose to expose and how much they wish to remain hidden.
I come from a family that doesn't talk about intangibles all that much. So my default perspective is to stick toward the more private edge of the curve. Which is kind of funny given how much I typically share on my blog and other online/media work.
It's a constant struggle to decide how far I'm willing to go...ideally, I'd like to think that any yearnings I have on any level would be fully vetted with my wife and kids first before expanding the scope.
Ooh, it's too early in the week for introspection. Sorry!
:)
hi Julie....I wondered where you went! i came by but didnt have blogger open, so couldn't leave a comment....will do.
Tim....i love how you expressed it here. All does seem right in the world when they line up.
Interestingly, I took the fog photo on Monday morning from the end of my street and then Katie sent me the quote. The two fit in my head......the second photo I took around this time last year when my family and I had visited Toronto Island the day after my father in laws funeral. It was a magically healing day.....my husband's cousin lives on the island, which is just a short ferry from downtown Toronto.....when we arrived, she had bikes for the four of us to use to ride around the little island.....given that it was off season, we seemed to have the whole place to ourselves.....the picture is of an old lighthouse....I love the jetstream overtop piercing the blue sky.
Both pictures to me fit the quote.....yearnings both inside and out. :)
Carmi....loving your introspections....it's never too early or too late as far as i'm concerned.
I'm pretty much an open book, though there are lines i wont cross on this blog, and understand exactly what you mean.
I love the chem-trail / religion connection (last photo) - very subtle.
thanks Dan.....i find it kind of sexual myself...in a subtle way.
Do you know Leunig's wonderful books of --- well, how to describe them? --- they are almost poetry set to cartoons, or cartoon images accompanying almost poetry. Absolutely gorgeous (and I always associate them with Canada rather than Australia since I was given my first book of them when I was in W'loo).
N.
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