February 2006 | Whole Life Review
Falling In Love, Walking With Desire
by Trebbe Johnson
We call it falling in love. When you think of it, though, love is actually the place we land in—if we’re lucky. What we fall through in the first wild, sweet flush of romance is desire, and it’s a thrilling ride with ups and downs of fascination, curiosity, joy and passion. It is possible to resist this exhilarating plunge, but few choose to do so.
Desire itself is desirable. When we fall in love—or fall through desire—we become like geodes, those nuggets of rock that are rough and drab on the outside, but which, broken open and buffed, reveal a jeweled core. For millennia, poets and singers, playwrights and artists, novelists and filmmakers have turned to desire and its transformations as a topic that never ceases to provide inspiration. Yet what the art they make rarely conveys is that the polisher of those rough surfaces is not the beloved, but the lover’s own awakened being as it quickens to the grandeur of loving and being loved. Suddenly we have the opportunity to lavish upon another all the wondrous aspects of ourselves that we feel have remained untapped till now: creativity, sexiness, tenderness, an adventurous spirit. Believing that the other will somehow make us more of who we were destined to be, we behave in ways that fulfill the very prophecy we imagine. We glow. We sparkle. We carry light inside us and shine on the world as we go.
Eventually, of course, the fall must end, whether in a long, loving marriage, a quick and tumultuous break-up or anything in between. We hit ground. We see that the other person is no magician come to transform us, but simply another human in search of his or her own jeweled core—who just happened to believe for a time that it could be found in us. We are cast back to our old selves again, dull and unpolished. It feels like a terrible betrayal.
But something even better can arise at the end of the fall—or whenever we choose to take it on. If we dare to keep our breached heart open and experiment with a different kind of desire, one that is open-ended, unpredictable and full of potential, we not only discover endless new facets of that jeweled core, but take control of it, so we can move into a world of our own choosing, our own delight. This transformed desire is not directed at just one person. It does not fade. It powers us through good times and bad, constantly replenishing us with an ever-greater capacity to love and to act from love.
The great German poet, Goethe, called it “soulful yearning,” a longing to be part of something that is both inconceivably mysterious and utterly familiar to our deepest being. Myths from around the world tell of the beguiling, often divine Beloved who beckons his or her human lover forth and then, after the blissful embrace, the enchanting smile, slips away once more into the unknown, compelling the lover to embark on an endless journey toward reunion. Call it the Beloved, the soul, life force, God, Goddess or Spirit, this elusive, alluring force draws us constantly toward our own highest self, the very self that emerges when we fall in love.
I myself embarked on a pilgrimage into soulful desire a few years ago when, at the age of 50, happily married and immersed in work I loved, I plummeted into fascination for a younger man. Because I was determined not to jeopardize my marriage, yet also unwilling to turn my back on what felt like a dynamiting of my whole being, I decided to follow the trail of desire itself. In the process I discovered that the heady fall through infatuation can be transformed into a slow, graceful and deliberate saunter into deep, authentic passion and allurement.
I had to begin by recognizing that the man who upturned me was not the ideal, divine Beloved himself, but a vital escort to my own higher being. Such is often the case. The new lover perceives us in some way we cannot yet see ourselves. Or he possesses certain qualities—honesty, discipline, a sense of play—that we long to develop. For example, the man I was smitten with had had a dream that I was a beautiful sorceress who called people forth to the top of a mountain—or to their highest self. The image—and the fact that it came from his deep psyche—gave me courage to step toward embodying my own desired self. Defining dormant, desirable qualities in ourselves, we can strive to cultivate them. This is no easy process. We are likely to face mighty resistance, not from others, as we often fear, but from our own old habit patterns, our fear of change, or stubborn conviction that it is more important to be likeable and polite than bold and authentic. It’s a process that, thankfully, never ends (if it did, we would simply be stuck in dull changelessness). Yet every step brings us closer to reconciliation between who we are and who we choose to become, as if we are constantly taking on a more and more delicately refined and luminous version of ourselves.
The Hopis of northeastern Arizona have a grammatical tense with which to speak of this process of becoming. It is called tunatya, and it refers specifically to the rounding of something into its own fullness: seeds into corn, clouds into life-giving rain, words that form on the tongue before they are spoken. We can usher forth our own becoming by consciously paying attention to what allures us, what our soul desires. This doesn’t mean indulging unwisely in material gratifications. Rather we seek to follow what beckons the essential self: new intellectual, creative and spiritual pursuits; the song of a redwing blackbird on a spring morning; a longtime wish to learn Italian; an inclination to volunteer with a local charity whose work tugs the heart. It means taking bold steps every day that we fear to take and that our life depends on.
We tend to think that pursuing a new life-path means devising a big, visionary (possibly overwhelming) path, but, in truth, the world beckons us forth each day in surprisingly manageable ways. I once witnessed someone succumbing to an act of soulful desire on a New York subway. Across the aisle from me a ragged, unkempt man, who was either asleep or drunk, had slumped so far over that one swift curve in the rails would have toppled him to the floor. The train stopped, a man got on. He had thinning hair and a brown, ill-fitting suit. Making his way to an empty seat, he paused before the stranger, gently slipped his hands under the man’s armpits to right him, then moved on. The world had issued an invitation to him to be his greatest self in that small, anonymous moment, and willingly, he had accepted.
How different is such a movement, graceful and deliberate, from the crazy freefall of romantic desire. Now, instead of a dive without discipline, a rag doll drop to the depths, the lover moves confidently toward a coalescing image of the sacred self. Instead of “falling” in love and hoping to land without pain, we traverse ground that gains new meaning from the very way we cover it. We choose the direction we move toward, whether the immediate destination is a troubled stranger on a subway, a blank canvas, a mountain trail, the hospital bed of a friend or a refugee camp in Sudan. Any place that calls us forth into a desire to be more of ourselves is a blessed place, and on the journey toward it, the void before each new step is filled with potential. All is uncreated. Determining the direction of the soul’s calling, we turn that way, only to find that the radiance that attracts us now illuminates our own face. We walk into the world as into the arms of a waiting lover.
Based on the book The World is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved ©2005 by Trebbe Johnson. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. newworldlibrary.com.
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