I love this. I've always felt that longing is the separated individual aching to return to the oneness of All. The more love you have the more grabby you may need to be because your need to immerse yourself in unity and escape separation is powerful.
And you write it all so beautifully, such rewarding sentences as always. Such a pleasure to read. I was just talking to my nephew about song writing and we were talking about how the truly personal is also the universal. The most vulnerable offerings are the most powerful because we all feel those things without necessarily being able to share them. And you do this very thing so openly and so eloquently. Seriously good Kimberly, thanks.
And damn I love that Elder Beast. I want to come across one in the forest.
Thank you for this generous comment friend! Gosh, I feel hugged. And "rewarding sentence." I love that idea. That a phrase alone can return something to us. :) Now I have to ask, are you and your nephew songwriters? I couldn't agree more with your reflection—the truly personal resonates in the universal. Humans try so hard to "think" their way into creating something that people will relate to, but I think that's a backwards approach. Go within, find that deeply vulnerable hum and then create from there. (And keep your eyes open, those Elder Beasts might just appear under a fern. Maybe someday when I'm old and feeble, I'll get back to needle felting, creating them to send all over the world Amelie-style, and have friends position them in magical little forest nooks.)
The longing you describe so resonates with me and comes to me as more poem than the prose it is. Your way of weaving in the personal with Rumi, with your reading, with your conversation with Veronika, with what happened so long ago that must have felt like abandon, and yet the full essay defines love.
Oh Mary! If any of my writing "defines love" then I will die happy. I thought about you while writing this—your own masterful weaving of longing into fiction and memoir, I feel it just below the surface of every scene and it is truly divine. You are such a light in my life. x
Your observations reflect skill and understanding. I like your writing - and I admire Kimberley's too (I think it was you who introduced me to her work) ... and I respect Rumi notwithstanding the translation accuracy debate; of Hafiz work I've read, there has been a couplet that rings so true to this mystery what we want for, ache for, not from the universe but from someone. I thought it was Hafiz, but my memory was wrong - I've been attributing it to Hafiz for more than twenty years and it seems not to be from 13th century Persia, but a mangled pair of lines from a Robert Frost poem - and it bears repeating no matter who invented the words, because the image is timeless (and I think Frost wouldn't mind my mangling:
I agree Mark! Not all longing is ambient. Some of it names us. Some of it knocks on the door with a human face, asking not just to be felt, but to be held. Not surprising that you attributed these lines to Hafiz with his life's devotion to longing and love.
I know this longing well. I can feel you reaching in this essay and it’s so beautiful. I spent most of my life with this insatiable longing, which has been the engine for all of my creative work without exception. I think if I didn’t have the work as an outlet, I would’ve lost my mind in my twenties. Thank you for writing this exquisite piece. You’ve tapped into something through the universal.
Your creative longing is such a beautiful thing Ben. I feel it in everything you do and it's a fire that fans a thousand other flames. I used to have a stronger creative longing, and I miss that feeling. I expressed it as, "wanting to be in the pulse of creativity." I still create, as you know, but the fire doesn't burn in the way it used to, and that might just be some protective dimmer switch in my brain. Nevertheless, I savor it in others and it reminds me of that joyous reach that never can be filled.
I couldn't agree more! The longing is the message and the answer. Of course, answers come all the time, in whatever forms... and the longing remains. Not because we are greedy, but as long as we're alive.
I remember talking to my therapist about this longing (in the context of dealing with my 'dysfunctional relationship pattern'.) I clearly remember her trying to talk me out of my longing, pouring cold water over my dreaming and most fervent aching desires. I was stunned. Glad I didn't listen!
My entire body of work now couldn't have grown without this deep longing, which is somehow entangled with the trauma, but I no longer believe that the 'trauma is the cause'. It may be a trigger, but the whole 'cause and effect thinking' is unhelpful. It is what makes therapists tell their clients to 'stop the longing' because 'longing causes unhappiness'...
As if without the longing we would be happier...
As if the longing was something we could just switch off...
I experience this longing as my guiding star.
Thank you for sharing your story (and our conversation) and fanning out your precious thoughts and feelings and associations around it. The lone Kaua‘i ʻŌʻō bird. Mother Earth reaching out to the sky. This is truly precious 💗 🙏 ✨
I'm also glad you didn't listen Veronika! Sadly, I think a lot of therapeutic models still try to fill or fix this longing, or use it to "manifest manifest manifest!" Your body of work endlessly informs me, no, lives in me. I don't know if I've ever felt a deeper resonance with a philosophy—and throwing out cause and effect is like throwing a middle finger to the patriarchy and all that shaped it. Someday I hope humanity will be able to look back on our linear, anthropological paradigm and laugh at its absurdity. Life is a looping, swirling, torus through space and time. Keeping following that guiding star, it's revealed so much that is now benefiting so many. :)
Gorgeous, Kimberly. You're describing the indescribable, bringing the ineffable from thought into meaning to share with us.
We all feel this longing at times. It is part of the "multi-" that is us. Those of us who are eloquent enough to bring it from longing into form do service to those of us who feel it but think we are alone with our feelings.
Beautifully expressed Robin. This aloneness is probably one of life's greatest illusions. I love how Sophie Strand reimagined her body as a continuum of longing; if we could only remind ourselves in that aloneness of the infinite forms of life within us (molecular, cellular, ancestral) reaching toward each other.
Isn't it wonderful that profound and painful can live alongside one another? You define longing in that one sentence dear friend.
Thank you for celebrating these musings with me. I feel you "get it" on the deepest of levels. When I write, I ask that my conditioned mind take a nap so that something new, something "other" might make their offering, so to read your comment makes me think maybe, just maybe, it works sometimes. ;)
Gosh, this piece is a poem. Just gorgeous. Have you heard of the Welsh word "hiraeth"? It doesn't have a direct translation, but it is loosely a yearning for something that could have been - an ache that is both beautiful and so heavy it hurts. I thought of it as I was reading.
I haven't! And I wish I could hear you say it, the way my American accent wraps around those syllables I'm certain does it no justice. A yearning for something that could have been... like the song of that last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird perhaps, a song that longs to reach into the future, not the past. So beautiful. Thank you for sharing that expression with me!
Good grief Kimberley, I am literally aching with love for this exquisite and profoundly far reaching essay. This witchery of words... I've read twice, have not left my thoughts since, this "the gesture doesn’t begin in my hands. It runs deeper, threading through sinew and bone, then beyond, all the way back to star-dusted source. That first breath. That first scream. The moment one rends into many. The moment life begins not in wholeness, but in rupture. Longing is the echo of that rupture."
I have been wondering since writing my own last post and reading yours about the thin veil between longing and belonging. The two words are not so distant.... We are all in search of a place we belong but what if that searching is in the wrong direction? What if belonging is in fact a longing for the very beginnings of whence we came? I don't know the answer but reading "Longing is the echo of rupture... wow! Yes!!
Within of each of us is a great capacity to love, sometimes that love is tainted by sadness, illness, loss. We strive, whether consciously or not, to return to an origin, a place where love is pure, un-ruptured by disconnection, by life, by being a single body in a vast ocean of others.
We ache for love - longing, for connection - belonging.
Heartfelt thanks for this beautiful, thought provoking essay - as always your words are a a most beautiful symphony I want to listen to again and again... ♥️
PS I am half way through listening to the wonderful conversation between you and Veronika... time that so elusive commodity!
I feel longing in everything you write Susie, it sings from you in the most beautiful, arresting way. And I love that our minds were both tangling with longing and belonging this past week. If we can "be" with our longing, will be then, truly belong? Your offering was so moving, especially how this longing takes shape in your mothering—both insistent and gentle in its delivery. Wishing you many pangs of that rupture in the coming weeks, and many more echoes that return the song to you tenfold. xoxoxo
I had a time in my late teens like this, Kimberley--traveling as a response to trauma, trying to fill a longing I barely acknowledged and felt ashamed of. My relationship to longing has had a long journey since. These words especially spoke to me: "I stopped trying to fill the ache and let the ache sing. I wasn’t reaching for something. I was reaching with something."
Thank you for writing about your aliveness to yourself and the world. :)
Traveling does offer way for that trauma to finally move, doesn't it? Even if we are still dancing around "being with the longing" and instead trying to fill it, there is something about meeting the world with this ache, anew each day in new countries, new places, that feels very true and alive. I do like that idea too, to reach "with" something instead of "for." An important distinction that puts me back in my center with a sense of agency and gratitude for the ache. :)
Riding that wave with you Holly! I can't help the wordplay, but when you and Ruby (or now Vincent) are out adventuring, I see that open road before you, commonly described as a "long stretch." Now when I picture you on the road, I'll see those wheels spinning on your "longing stretch." xo
Ohhhhh. I might have to borrow this "longing stretch." In fact, I just finished a piece (a flash piece that I'm entering in a contest) that could be the perfect title for. Might I borrow it?
PS. Vincent has morphed into Vinnie. And she's getting a glow-up. Photos somewhere soon.
Awww, even extinction remembers the ache. Soul bomb.
Am I reading my soul marrow? I, too, have danced that ache—alone, across continents, in retreats and silent rooms, letting the shape of longing move through me until it wasn’t reaching for anything, but reaching with something ancient, wordless, true.
I lived for a time in renunciation, the promise of exclusion and prayer—early twenties, trading work for wonder, tending both soil and soul, body and wound. Longing was my constant companion then, too. Not a problem to fix, but a presence I slowly learned to trust. Your line—“emptiness that needs no opposite”—took my breath. Yes. The ache itself is the vow.
Thank you for writing this with such unguarded grace. You’ve put language to the remembering that moves beneath story and before time. An ancient resonance. I feel seen.
"the ache itself is the vow." I feel this in every leafing, leaping, unfurling gesture in nature, and I feel this now in you, too, dear human. What a treasure to meet you here.
Thank you Kimberly for sharing your post, your longing, with me! SO beautiful. Yes indeed, you have beautifully captured the longing that IS our life force compelling us forward. I too, used to think I had to fill these longings rather than simply allowing them. Infinitely more alive.
I love this. I've always felt that longing is the separated individual aching to return to the oneness of All. The more love you have the more grabby you may need to be because your need to immerse yourself in unity and escape separation is powerful.
And you write it all so beautifully, such rewarding sentences as always. Such a pleasure to read. I was just talking to my nephew about song writing and we were talking about how the truly personal is also the universal. The most vulnerable offerings are the most powerful because we all feel those things without necessarily being able to share them. And you do this very thing so openly and so eloquently. Seriously good Kimberly, thanks.
And damn I love that Elder Beast. I want to come across one in the forest.
Thank you for this generous comment friend! Gosh, I feel hugged. And "rewarding sentence." I love that idea. That a phrase alone can return something to us. :) Now I have to ask, are you and your nephew songwriters? I couldn't agree more with your reflection—the truly personal resonates in the universal. Humans try so hard to "think" their way into creating something that people will relate to, but I think that's a backwards approach. Go within, find that deeply vulnerable hum and then create from there. (And keep your eyes open, those Elder Beasts might just appear under a fern. Maybe someday when I'm old and feeble, I'll get back to needle felting, creating them to send all over the world Amelie-style, and have friends position them in magical little forest nooks.)
The longing you describe so resonates with me and comes to me as more poem than the prose it is. Your way of weaving in the personal with Rumi, with your reading, with your conversation with Veronika, with what happened so long ago that must have felt like abandon, and yet the full essay defines love.
Oh Mary! If any of my writing "defines love" then I will die happy. I thought about you while writing this—your own masterful weaving of longing into fiction and memoir, I feel it just below the surface of every scene and it is truly divine. You are such a light in my life. x
And you are a light in mine, m'dear. I did think of the longing in Who by Fire when I read this--and how much we seem in sync with one another.
Your observations reflect skill and understanding. I like your writing - and I admire Kimberley's too (I think it was you who introduced me to her work) ... and I respect Rumi notwithstanding the translation accuracy debate; of Hafiz work I've read, there has been a couplet that rings so true to this mystery what we want for, ache for, not from the universe but from someone. I thought it was Hafiz, but my memory was wrong - I've been attributing it to Hafiz for more than twenty years and it seems not to be from 13th century Persia, but a mangled pair of lines from a Robert Frost poem - and it bears repeating no matter who invented the words, because the image is timeless (and I think Frost wouldn't mind my mangling:
I can think of no greater devotion,
Than to be shore to your ocean.
I agree Mark! Not all longing is ambient. Some of it names us. Some of it knocks on the door with a human face, asking not just to be felt, but to be held. Not surprising that you attributed these lines to Hafiz with his life's devotion to longing and love.
I know this longing well. I can feel you reaching in this essay and it’s so beautiful. I spent most of my life with this insatiable longing, which has been the engine for all of my creative work without exception. I think if I didn’t have the work as an outlet, I would’ve lost my mind in my twenties. Thank you for writing this exquisite piece. You’ve tapped into something through the universal.
Your creative longing is such a beautiful thing Ben. I feel it in everything you do and it's a fire that fans a thousand other flames. I used to have a stronger creative longing, and I miss that feeling. I expressed it as, "wanting to be in the pulse of creativity." I still create, as you know, but the fire doesn't burn in the way it used to, and that might just be some protective dimmer switch in my brain. Nevertheless, I savor it in others and it reminds me of that joyous reach that never can be filled.
This is heart-achingly beautiful!
I couldn't agree more! The longing is the message and the answer. Of course, answers come all the time, in whatever forms... and the longing remains. Not because we are greedy, but as long as we're alive.
I remember talking to my therapist about this longing (in the context of dealing with my 'dysfunctional relationship pattern'.) I clearly remember her trying to talk me out of my longing, pouring cold water over my dreaming and most fervent aching desires. I was stunned. Glad I didn't listen!
My entire body of work now couldn't have grown without this deep longing, which is somehow entangled with the trauma, but I no longer believe that the 'trauma is the cause'. It may be a trigger, but the whole 'cause and effect thinking' is unhelpful. It is what makes therapists tell their clients to 'stop the longing' because 'longing causes unhappiness'...
As if without the longing we would be happier...
As if the longing was something we could just switch off...
I experience this longing as my guiding star.
Thank you for sharing your story (and our conversation) and fanning out your precious thoughts and feelings and associations around it. The lone Kaua‘i ʻŌʻō bird. Mother Earth reaching out to the sky. This is truly precious 💗 🙏 ✨
I'm also glad you didn't listen Veronika! Sadly, I think a lot of therapeutic models still try to fill or fix this longing, or use it to "manifest manifest manifest!" Your body of work endlessly informs me, no, lives in me. I don't know if I've ever felt a deeper resonance with a philosophy—and throwing out cause and effect is like throwing a middle finger to the patriarchy and all that shaped it. Someday I hope humanity will be able to look back on our linear, anthropological paradigm and laugh at its absurdity. Life is a looping, swirling, torus through space and time. Keeping following that guiding star, it's revealed so much that is now benefiting so many. :)
that's so sooo good to know, Kimberly. It's comments like this that keep me going! Seriously!!!
Gorgeous, Kimberly. You're describing the indescribable, bringing the ineffable from thought into meaning to share with us.
We all feel this longing at times. It is part of the "multi-" that is us. Those of us who are eloquent enough to bring it from longing into form do service to those of us who feel it but think we are alone with our feelings.
Thank you for that gift.
Beautifully expressed Robin. This aloneness is probably one of life's greatest illusions. I love how Sophie Strand reimagined her body as a continuum of longing; if we could only remind ourselves in that aloneness of the infinite forms of life within us (molecular, cellular, ancestral) reaching toward each other.
I don't even have words to express how deeply profound, painful and beautiful this is.
I still feel the goodbyes, the longing of my roots.
"Because without longing, nothing would begin."
You write from an other worldy place. ox
Isn't it wonderful that profound and painful can live alongside one another? You define longing in that one sentence dear friend.
Thank you for celebrating these musings with me. I feel you "get it" on the deepest of levels. When I write, I ask that my conditioned mind take a nap so that something new, something "other" might make their offering, so to read your comment makes me think maybe, just maybe, it works sometimes. ;)
It worked. Unknowingly, I carried this with me in my last piece. A short film/meditation from my quick visit with my mom and brother.
Then I read your piece a few days later.
Your words, my film, might have been a serendipitous soul offering.
Sending you much love Kimberly. ox
Beautiful. I cannot imagine life without longing. To me, that would be stagnation.
Yes! Like the Dead Sea, largely inhospitable to life and all its vital reaching.
And that Elder Beast! Wow!! 🪶 🤍🙏 🎶 🦉💕
Awww, I'm glad you like him! He sits just to the left of my desk, always reminding me to open to wonder, to longing. to the unseen and unimaginable.
Gosh, this piece is a poem. Just gorgeous. Have you heard of the Welsh word "hiraeth"? It doesn't have a direct translation, but it is loosely a yearning for something that could have been - an ache that is both beautiful and so heavy it hurts. I thought of it as I was reading.
I haven't! And I wish I could hear you say it, the way my American accent wraps around those syllables I'm certain does it no justice. A yearning for something that could have been... like the song of that last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird perhaps, a song that longs to reach into the future, not the past. So beautiful. Thank you for sharing that expression with me!
Good grief Kimberley, I am literally aching with love for this exquisite and profoundly far reaching essay. This witchery of words... I've read twice, have not left my thoughts since, this "the gesture doesn’t begin in my hands. It runs deeper, threading through sinew and bone, then beyond, all the way back to star-dusted source. That first breath. That first scream. The moment one rends into many. The moment life begins not in wholeness, but in rupture. Longing is the echo of that rupture."
I have been wondering since writing my own last post and reading yours about the thin veil between longing and belonging. The two words are not so distant.... We are all in search of a place we belong but what if that searching is in the wrong direction? What if belonging is in fact a longing for the very beginnings of whence we came? I don't know the answer but reading "Longing is the echo of rupture... wow! Yes!!
Within of each of us is a great capacity to love, sometimes that love is tainted by sadness, illness, loss. We strive, whether consciously or not, to return to an origin, a place where love is pure, un-ruptured by disconnection, by life, by being a single body in a vast ocean of others.
We ache for love - longing, for connection - belonging.
Heartfelt thanks for this beautiful, thought provoking essay - as always your words are a a most beautiful symphony I want to listen to again and again... ♥️
PS I am half way through listening to the wonderful conversation between you and Veronika... time that so elusive commodity!
I feel longing in everything you write Susie, it sings from you in the most beautiful, arresting way. And I love that our minds were both tangling with longing and belonging this past week. If we can "be" with our longing, will be then, truly belong? Your offering was so moving, especially how this longing takes shape in your mothering—both insistent and gentle in its delivery. Wishing you many pangs of that rupture in the coming weeks, and many more echoes that return the song to you tenfold. xoxoxo
🙏🏼♥️
I had a time in my late teens like this, Kimberley--traveling as a response to trauma, trying to fill a longing I barely acknowledged and felt ashamed of. My relationship to longing has had a long journey since. These words especially spoke to me: "I stopped trying to fill the ache and let the ache sing. I wasn’t reaching for something. I was reaching with something."
Thank you for writing about your aliveness to yourself and the world. :)
Traveling does offer way for that trauma to finally move, doesn't it? Even if we are still dancing around "being with the longing" and instead trying to fill it, there is something about meeting the world with this ache, anew each day in new countries, new places, that feels very true and alive. I do like that idea too, to reach "with" something instead of "for." An important distinction that puts me back in my center with a sense of agency and gratitude for the ache. :)
Yes, thank you, I'll keep that one.
In reading your recent, insightful writing, I experienced BOTH…the Longing and the Return. A delicious meal! ❤️
Oh!!!! How splendid momma! To feel both in one breath is a true gift.
Kimberly! This is among my favorite in the series—and that is saying a whole lot.
My goodness you lay this out so gorgeously—the way longing is a wave within that makes us real to ourselves and to the reality of existence.
I will save this one and read it again, my wise talented friend.
Riding that wave with you Holly! I can't help the wordplay, but when you and Ruby (or now Vincent) are out adventuring, I see that open road before you, commonly described as a "long stretch." Now when I picture you on the road, I'll see those wheels spinning on your "longing stretch." xo
Ohhhhh. I might have to borrow this "longing stretch." In fact, I just finished a piece (a flash piece that I'm entering in a contest) that could be the perfect title for. Might I borrow it?
PS. Vincent has morphed into Vinnie. And she's getting a glow-up. Photos somewhere soon.
Yay!!! I was hoping you’d use it!!!!
Can’t wait to see Vinnie’s glamour shots.
Breathtaking.
Thank you dear friend.
Awww, even extinction remembers the ache. Soul bomb.
Am I reading my soul marrow? I, too, have danced that ache—alone, across continents, in retreats and silent rooms, letting the shape of longing move through me until it wasn’t reaching for anything, but reaching with something ancient, wordless, true.
I lived for a time in renunciation, the promise of exclusion and prayer—early twenties, trading work for wonder, tending both soil and soul, body and wound. Longing was my constant companion then, too. Not a problem to fix, but a presence I slowly learned to trust. Your line—“emptiness that needs no opposite”—took my breath. Yes. The ache itself is the vow.
Thank you for writing this with such unguarded grace. You’ve put language to the remembering that moves beneath story and before time. An ancient resonance. I feel seen.
"the ache itself is the vow." I feel this in every leafing, leaping, unfurling gesture in nature, and I feel this now in you, too, dear human. What a treasure to meet you here.
Same, sister. I look forward to more of your stories.
💙🌹💜
Thank you Kimberly for sharing your post, your longing, with me! SO beautiful. Yes indeed, you have beautifully captured the longing that IS our life force compelling us forward. I too, used to think I had to fill these longings rather than simply allowing them. Infinitely more alive.
Yes! You and the flowers understand this on a cellular level. Thank you for taking a moment to read and reflect. 🌼