Longing As Compass
The Source of Striving
PHOTO BY AERAN SQUIRES
Since we first published this essay from Justine Epstein—organizer, facilitator, writer, naturalist, tracker, and Weaving Earth Executive Board Member—many of our readers have returned again and again to “Longing As Compass” for guidance.
Notes Justine:
In these times of planetary crisis, I find myself contemplating what my activism looks like when how I show up to the crumbling systems is shaped by the world I long for. I’m thinking about how longing could provide a blueprint for our collective transformation. How it could guide us towards greater wholeness, connection, freedom. Could we learn to trust longing as a compass that orients us towards a more just and healed world? Can acknowledging the longings at the root of our judgments help us cultivate our collective capacity to weave new worlds? Who might we become when we see ourselves and one another in our tenderness and vulnerability? What do we need, what do I need, in order to begin to experiment?
As we seed our intentions for 2024, we hope that Justine’s words can be a continual compass for our community.
My first encounter with a cedar waxwing happened six years ago. It was early November, and just days before I had been sitting at the table in my mothers’ kitchen, lighting a candle to bless the meal. In a sudden surge of feeling, I sensed the presence of my ancestors — first in my body in the space between my shoulder blades, and then filling the room. Tears welled up in my eyes and spilled onto the plate in front of me. It was as if family members whom I’d known and lost in my life came close, trailing behind them the complex and mysterious lineages that we came from.
The cedar waxwing hit a window a couple of days later. The sound startled me from a conversation I was having with a friend about ancestors. Their tiny body, motionless on the deck outside the house, was still warm but already lifeless when I found them. As I knelt next to the songbird, I was overcome by the distinct beauty of their feathers, the auburn-copper wings, the dusky yellow breast, the black mask of their eyes rimmed in a gentle trace of white, the dramatic yellow-tipped tail. And most precious, perhaps, were the tiny red droplets of wax at the tip of each wing. As I held their small body in my hands, I noticed a dozen living waxwing kin in the branches of the surrounding fir trees, witnessing. Mourning, maybe. I was momentarily reminded of the convening with my ancestors at the table a few nights before. I wondered if those waxwings shared in that sensation of longing and loss bound up in such love.
Since then, cedar waxwings (bombycilla cedrorum) have become a deep love of mine. I’ve learned to identify them by how they move together: watching a flock of them fly through the sky is like watching a single rapid traverse the flow of a river. Ephemeral and staggering, this movement and the beings that make it have come to symbolize a kind of fortitude of belonging for me. There’s a magic in their togetherness. Each time I witness waxwing flight, it inspires awe and a tug of longing, too — a whisper from my ancestors who likely knew that kind of interdependence. Like a forgotten memory, it beckons from somewhere deep within me, and I am learning to follow.
Longing is an uncomfortable yet familiar ache in my body — an invisible rope, knotted at my solar plexus, tugging down towards my sacrum and out in front of me simultaneously. In moments when I simply allow myself to attune to the somatic sensation, I am reminded of the force of a magnet being pulled towards its opposite pole. I am reminded of reaching, of hunger, of that deep instinct that compels a newborn baby to clamber towards the breast for the first time, or the salmon to swim back up the distinct stream of their birth.
My familiarity with longing is rooted in my early experiences seeking belonging, intimacy, eros, creativity, purpose, direction, meaning, and community. When recalling moments of longing from my own biography, I think about my parents’ divorce, and the longing I had for their love to be stronger than their pain. I think about middle school crushes, cliques, and the cool kids in my neighborhood — that seduction towards closeness and being wanted that was wonder mixed with distance. I think about how those sensations shaped me as a young person, beckoning me to reach towards people, places, books, ideas, and practices that influenced my becoming.
I got self-conscious as I grew up. I became shy, reserved, careful. And as I grew more and more afraid to share what I longed for, the louder those longings became within me. That dissonance fueled loneliness and isolation and the belief that I was unworthy of what I longed for. Over the course of the years that I spent trying to escape from that dissonance, longing evolved into something that I deeply distrusted. I remember once that when someone asked me to date them in high school, I said “no” before even taking a breath. There were many superficial reasons for that “no.” But on some deep level, it stemmed from my distrusting the vulnerability required to meet someone reaching for connection across the chasm of longing. I wasn’t willing or ready to show all that I had learned to hide, especially from myself.
All these years later, I have grown curious about longing — how it has informed and shaped not only my singular biography, but also the ways in which it can be re-understood as a cultural, historical, political and spiritual force. What actually is longing? What does my access to and experience of longing have to teach me? Could an excavation of my longings actually lead me to a source of striving that can inform my activism and my imagination, urge me to dare to show, to reach for the world I long to inhabit? How might a more nuanced and complex understanding of longing open up creative possibilities for how to live a meaningful life in this age of the anthropocene?
In beginning to think more deeply about longing, I had a conversation with someone for whom longing is an essential aspect in understanding humanness. Kathleen Lockyer, founder of RxOutside, is an occupational therapist whose work focuses on training people to remember how to work with and heal healthy children. I got connected to Kathleen through a friend who worked with her at Weaving Earth’s “Wild Tenders” program, a nature-based educational program for youth in northern California. When I told my friend I was writing about longing, he said, “You should call Kathleen.” So I did.
Kathleen first encountered the concept of longing in Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, in which he writes, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” What children are reaching for on the deepest level, she believes, is the earth. Integral to the human being is what she calls the “nature sense” — the umbilicus between each human being and the natural world that evolved and continues to give us life. Every aspect of the human organism’s operating system — nervous system, instincts, digestive system — was evolutionarily designed in collaboration with the world around us. She calls it “an ongoing conversation with nature.”
Kathleen applies the concept of life longing for itself to her work with children. “Kids are really good at longing,” she says. “They don’t censor it. They’re showing it all the time. Sometimes it can look like a really annoying behavior and sometimes it is a moment of deep wisdom that children express, an insight into life.” Our contemporary culture has socialized adults to say “no” to their children’s expressions of longing: getting dirty, squishing bugs, exploring their bodies, playing outside. This devaluing of a child’s basic instincts creates an inner chaos that can trigger emotional and behavior challenges, and become depression or anxiety as they grow up.
It is the thread of our longing that, Kathleen says, is at threat of severance in our contemporary culture. Her hope comes from the fact that our bodies — despite their exposure to the traumas and distortions of our culture of separation — remain in a multi-dimensional universe. And it’s in this universe that we can reconnect by reclaiming our sensory relationships to the world around us. We can begin anywhere, at any moment. “Remember,” she says, “that every moment we stop and give ourselves over to our senses, that is life loving us. The answers for how we create a culture that honors longing is in how we love life back, how we participate in the conversation.”
Like Kathleen, I’m learning to think of longing as the way in which my body pulls me back towards loving contact and conversation with the earth: the animal body, hungering to fulfill its original instructions. What is it to recognize myself as a longing being, and accept that longing is a part of what informs me, who I am and what and how I love?
I’m still learning to uncouple longing from the experiences of rejection, disappointment, pain or shame that have accompanied it in my life. Learning to trust the sensation again has been tender and complex, unearthing memories. In college, I got very drunk and slept with a good friends’ ex while she was still tender from their breakup. When I told her, the friendship ended. For months, I was guilt-ridden. I kept asking myself, why the hell did I do that? The more I asked that question, the more I disliked and judged myself. But I kept digging until I began to uncover my own longings for love, for erotic fulfillment, for intimacy, for community, and to understand that these longings, left unconscious, drove me to harm people that I cared most about.
During this self-reckoning process, I began to ask myself: What is the belief system that justified such behavior? Where did that belief-system originate? What are the cultural, political and historical systems that inform my beliefs, feelings and behaviors? Are they actually in integrity with who I am and who I want to become going forward from this?
Pursuing these questions required that I widen my frame of reference from my own personal, individual context to a cultural, historical and political one. From there, I found that my own actions, beliefs and behaviors fit into much larger stories — like an ancestral story in which Eve was cast out of the garden as a punishment for her longing for knowledge. What stories and myths, inherited through my ancestral line, are still alive in my body and my mind? In what ways has my education around love, sex, and longing been informed by a culture still enforcing the laws from an omnipotent God commanding “thou shalt not covet…”? What was I taught, consciously or unconsciously, to long for? What was I taught to fear or condemn? How is the history of banishment of the erotic and earth-cherishing, the burning of witches, the colonization of indigeneity, alive in me? How does that lineage inform my thoughts, words and actions?
I came to recognize that so much of the foundation of my understanding of longing was informed by these bigger stories — western imperialism, colonization, and empire the world over. Longing has been perverted by cultures of separation, informed by the violent ideologies of white supremacy, conquest and extraction. Perhaps the lust for material consumption that drives the project of globalized capitalism is a superficial unconscious veneer to replace a deeper ancestral longing for that conversation with the earth. And perhaps if I begin to consciously reckon with my longings, acknowledging how they have been informed and even twisted by historical systems, I can take responsibility for my actions while slowly finding my way to self-forgiveness and compassion. In this case, opening to this wider story did not justify my behavior that drunken night. Rather, it lent me nuance and the capacity to recognize that healing from the cultural wounds of longing, erotic or otherwise, is not an individual task but a cultural and systemic one.
In Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown writes:
I am talking about the combination of adaptation with intention, wherein the orientation and movement towards life, towards longing, is made graceful in the act of adaptation. This is the process of changing while staying in touch with our deeper purpose and longing. 1
In these times of planetary crisis, I find myself contemplating what my activism looks like when how I show up to the crumbling systems is shaped by the world I long for. I’m thinking about how longing could provide a blueprint for our collective transformation. How it could guide us towards greater wholeness, connection, freedom. Could we learn to trust longing as a compass that orients us towards a more just and healed world? Can acknowledging the longings at the root of our judgments help us cultivate our collective capacity to weave new worlds? Who might we become when we see ourselves and one another in our tenderness and vulnerability? What do we need, what do I need, in order to begin to experiment?
The work of exploring the answers to these questions is work that I can’t do alone. I am just one organism informed by all my traumas, pain-points, socialization and limited beliefs. I think that what this work needs is communities of practice where we can prototype cultures in which what we long for and what we love has room to heal, root, and grow. Our collective intelligence, oriented towards longing as the sacred conversation between human beings and our planet, is required to support each of us through the throes of healing, each of us alchemizing our stories, our ancestors’ stories, our cultural stories, known and unknown. What if our bodies are sites of a mutual longing between our ancestors and the earth, non-linear time reaching for itself in every daring step to reveal ourselves in what we long for and what we love? What if the ache is the way we feel what the earth needs in our bodies? Maybe learning to listen together and hold each other in that tenderness guides us towards our contributions to systemic change.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit ponders whether longing could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, “since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance.”2 Learning to cherish my longing has been about learning to release the expectation of fulfillment, and to love the longing itself by living it. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advises the young poet to live questions:“...the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” I feel the same advice is true for longing: Live the longing, now, and perhaps we will gradually, without even noticing it, live our way into its fulfillment. And perhaps not. Like Dr. Martin Luther King’s “mountaintop,” I have to know I may not get there in my lifetime. Feeling the grief of that is part of longing’s risk, and what makes it precious, too. It takes courage to confront the unknown, and our fragile mortality and lack of control amidst all of life’s beauty and terror. But to be in the cultivated love and commitment to the possibility of that world of balance, liberation, sovereignty and peace, regardless — might reaching for it with my whole being and my whole life, feed its possibility?
I keep coming back to the cedar waxwings as my teachers of longing. Before I laid the dead waxwing in the cold, frozen earth, I clipped two feathers — a tail feather, edged with brilliant yellow, and a wing feather with a droplet of ruby wax — to carry with me as talismans, reminders of my obligation to listen and participate in the conversation that is life longing for itself through my body and this feathered body in my hands. In our coming together, to grieve, to mourn, but also to be in awe and wonder at the mystery of momentary fulfillment of aliveness: a gift.
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, 2017. (70)
Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Penguin Books, 2006. (30)