Desire

“...thin fire ... racing under skin.” - Sappho

Last night as I lay in my new apartment in my small, windowless room with unpacked boxes all around me, I realized, with great relief, that I was feeling resentful.

For the past seven days, to differing degrees, I have been throbbing with maddening desire for a new crush, anxious with grief because of turmoil that’s been brewing between my close friends, and laden with sorrow from a financial loss I’ve been carrying ever since Donald Trump banned diversity and destroyed my business.

And all this as I’ve been moving into a new apartment. Ha!

Like Gandalf, I have been wrestling with the Balrog. These past few days, “darkness took me and I strained out of thought and time.”

These feelings of desire, angst, and sorrow, you see, were tearing at the seams of my flesh, and although I’ve played Capoiera, done breath work, chanted, sat Vipassana, and done other hippy dippy shit to hold and shape my emotions, nothing could prepare me to enter this new territory except to actually enter it.

Nothing could prepare my bones to be lit on fire with the blue flame of Desire.

For me, any new somatic (read: body) download is its own psychedelic trip. This is how I’ve always been. It is my nature. I’ve felt physically deep — not just intellectually deep — all my life but this was a sin in the patriarchic home I was raised in. I’m only just now getting used to the natural unfolding of my wings.

So far, here is what I’ve learned:

Like Anger, Desire is a blue flame.

I haven’t felt her in years.

The last time I felt this burning sensation was back in 2020 during Covid when I had a summer fling that fizzled as quickly as it came. Still, what a beautiful comet that was.

Since then, and with the arrival of this newest meteor shower, I’ve had to learn how to recalibrate, to write poetry to Desire, and to walk beside her slowly, the way you might walk with a friend or beloved pet.

I’ve had to learn, in other words, not to get carried away, but simply, to love her.

As I’m sure you already detect, minefields abound.

I’m a domesticated mammal after all, living in a befuddling age of politicians gorging on stale, stiff visions of a purebred America, so desperate to deny their own instinctive animalistic reflexes they see them only outside themselves in immigrants or people of color preaching, however imperfectly, the doctrine of inclusion.

I’ve been conditioned by a politics of purification all my life and though my bones and my heart know that the promise of finding salvation anywhere beyond god’s green earth is a lie and that the wild and wise ways of Desire are my kinfolk, some part of my brain has been entrained to avoid making her acquaintance.

But I have incredible teachers and one of them is a dominatrix Buddhist nun who taught me that we give our cringes so much power when really, all a cringe is, is sensation. And as tantric teachings teach us, all sensation fully felt is ecstasy.

So, this weekend I decided, just this once, to take my time and taste the bittersweet nectar of Desire’s impermanence and follow the contours of her stunning choreography as best I could.

Slowly, as my fantasies rose, froze, thawed and passed, I caught my breath and saw how Desire does not belong to me; it has taken me such a long time to learn this actually, and the fact that I’m able to freely admit to this now feels like a miracle.

In my early twenties, Desire possessed me and filled me with projections I was too inexperienced to honor as such. I didn’t have enough Vipassana training under my belt, hadn’t completed enough hours of watching and honoring the coming and going of all forms.

So I clung to my projections like an idiot.

This weekend, the forms were back and vibing on cruise control. One by one, fantasies of what it might be like to spend time with a new crush roused in me and for the first time in my life I smiled and recognized them for what they were: Not the subject of my affection but some wet, photosynthetic secretion that affection produces. “Ah what a great fantasy” I said to myself with a smile as they appeared, one by one.

“Ah what a glorious vision!”

This, it turns out, is how Desire dances; she spins and sways and shows me her many forms and only when I honor her reverie does she tire and sit beside me and, finally, lay down to rest.

My only offering is my gratitude. Only after presenting her with this sacrifice do all her forms settle down in peace.

Mark Epstein explains in ‘Open to Desire’ that the Buddha taught that “the avoidance of the elusiveness of the object of desire…is the origin of suffering. The problem is not desire: it is clinging to, or craving, a particular outcome, one in which there is no remainder, in which the object is completely under our power. [emphasis: mine].”

In my twenties, the fantasies I had about men often blinded me to the flesh-and-blood beings before me. Robert Johnson called this blindness soul-image entrapment. After a few dates, I would often become transfixed by expectations and carried away by my own pregnant imaginings of the ineffable, which the image of my beloved somehow conjured in me, but could never live up to himself.

In this way, romance narrowed my aperture’s capacity to take in the Mystery of all things because I became too infatuated by a few of my own visions and disappointed when they did not come to pass.

But as I’ve grown, I’ve learned that these visions were never my own to begin with and the automatic reflex I have to use the language of ownership to describe my relationship to the divine is more evidence of the spiritual bankruptcy of our modern era and my place in it.

When the mourning dove coos in the early afternoon, to whom does the sound belong?

Who owns these reverberations? His mouth or my ears?

I possess nothing. In spite of what the captains of industry preach, every ”thing” is relational. Desire cannot be owned. Rather, it is just as Jesus said: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there will I abide in the midst.”

This is precisely how Desire, in all her fanfare, moves.

She is movement, process, assemblage. There are no dots on the screen; there is only dance. I am emergent from an unfolding that I will never be able to pin down. This is what it means to wrestle with the Goddess. It is to awaken to the fact that you are the universe orgasmically touching itself. As the great Carlo Rovelli wrote,

“We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy, with an even more astronomical number of links and potential combinations through which they can interact. We are not conscious of all this. ‘We’ are the process formed by this entire intricacy.”

There were moments this weekend when I forgot about this intricacy and misplaced my offering, and lost sight of it, and the blue flame rose in me and tormented me and I forgot the ever changing nature of my soul-image.

That’s okay.

It is also part of the dance.

Yet, still.

When it happened, when I became transfixed by a fantasy only to watch it inevitably fail to come to pass, I was carried down into the subterranean realms of resentment.

Now, I’m a scorpio rising, so it is my nature to dive; but there were a ton of uncomfortable moments where my thoughts ruminated and swirled and I remained stuck in the tightening sensation of unfulfillment.

“Why can’t I have what I want?”

“Why isn’t this unfolding in the perfect way I imagined it would, the way I imagined it should?”

“Why does it feel like I’m going crazy?”

“I don’t deserve this.”

“I’m so above this.”

At first I didn’t recognize the undercurrent of resentment peeking just above the swirling sensations in my abdomen. Resentment was playing a game of hide-and-seek. It was only late at night when I recognized it for what it was and named it, and felt, much to my surprise, relief.

Recognizing resentment moving in me felt like water for my soul because there was no shame involved. It felt so good I actually laughed out loud.

“So that’s what that feeling is! Hi resentment! Pleasure to make your acquaintance!”

And almost immediately, the tightening in my chest and abdomen dissolved.

Suddenly, I had more room to breathe. Suddenly, I didn’t need to take my fixations so seriously.

That night I learned that I summon resentment whenever I cling, that the rightness or wrongness of this is beside the point, and that what matters more is my capacity to witness this; to study the art of being whatever I am; to soften into the observation of my own hardness; and to erupt into tenderness again and again and again until I finally remember that my instinctive nature is tenderness.

As I embark upon my third decade around the sun and initiate further, deeper, into adulthood, I am letting myself go. I am becoming undone. I know how to rock back and forth to the coming and going of the forms, know even that sometimes, yes, I will get caught in them and that this too is part of the wild dance.

Finally, I am learning to give way to the birth-death-birth canal that will continue to carve into me long after I am dead and gone.

And for now, in this lifetime, on this plane, whenever a new crush comes along, I will surrender to Desire and let her have her way with me.