The Power of Longing
The Saturday Stroll, on noticing what matters. Also— 100 Days of Wonder | Week 10
The light rays stretch low and long across my dining room table piled haphazardly with the books I’m reading and my tower of notebooks, all dog-eared and underlined with thoughts scribbled in the margins like secret conversations.
I’ve been writing mostly by hand these days. It helps my squirrel brain focus long enough to maybe catch thoughts long enough to record them.
I’ve been watching the ink seep and scratch lines across my paper. Copying phrases I love from what I’m reading. Notating the techniques used and how I might adapt them to my devices. Reading with pen and paper in hand helps me hold on to what captures my imagination. Otherwise my thoughts are more a game of catch and release.
Our Week 10 Prompts ⬇️
This week I’ve been thinking about longing. The kind that dares us to want more than we currently have words for. Sue Monk Kidd writes, “Longing is one of the most eloquent and insistent ways the soul speaks.”
Spending decades in certain corners of evangelicalism, longing was portrayed as dangerous, and so were souls, unless they were saved. It was drilled deep that our souls should not, must not be trusted or listened to. Soulish was sinful and 3 inches removed from evil.
I was trained to stifle and shush, shelve and shame the very way the deepest part of me communicated. Longing was only holy if it was to make myself less and shrink my becoming into something palatable to the system I was in.
So I often lived a life only partly alive and called it sacred. It was more a function of being scared than anything set apart. But there was a sacristy in my soul and it was filled with longings I didn’t even know were there. One of them was to live a life of creativity.
Please hear me. Your creativity is not a selfish pursuit.
Many of you here reading this are women. These things are often especially true for us. There is a culture that expects us to be perennial caretakers, frequently even to the point of shutdown.
Friend, you are allowed to be true to what’s in your heart and open the door to listen to the longings in your soul. They are there for a reason.
Too often creativity is framed as a frivolous “little” hobby that only gets validated when a certain measure of “success” is reached. There are moments I even frame it that way to myself.
You are worthy of taking up space on a page. You are worthy of being seen and heard. You do not need to shrink who you are. You are not too much, too loud, too emotional, too quiet, too opinionated, or too sensitive.
If you have to shave off parts of who you are to be “welcome” that isn’t actual belonging. Belonging is found in the places we are allowed to “be longing” and have those dreams celebrated and supported. People who are invested in controlling narratives simply are afraid of anyone who has the ability to change them.
So welcome to a life of leaning into longing as good and beautiful and holy. It holds keys to how we connect to our creativity and often shows up as curiosity that becomes the doorway into deeper wonder.
I’m going to leave last week’s quote here again because I simply have not moved on from it.
“Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong…
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.”
— David Whyte
What are the things that bring you alive?
What is one thing you are curious to try? Who are the people in your world that see your longings and call them sacred? Where are the spaces you don’t have to be scared of getting it wrong?
Hopefully this space is one of them.
You are so very loved and I’m deeply grateful for you being here.
PS. I found this video unexpectedly really inspiring this week. It’s not my normal fare, but there are so many insights. Especially the segment with 82-year-old Dan from OK starting at 7:50 (I have his interview cued up in the link.)