The landscape of longing

It sprawls achingly, long limbed and feverish, beautiful, sorrowful, yearning. The wind blows through me bringing with it thousands of grains of desert sands. Whipped up by the hot midday sun and cooled by the icy night sky. I can feel each single grain, can feel you in each and every one of them.

The world keeps turning, I feel that too. I sense the mountain groaning, a yawning in the earth, so old. The starlight is piercing, the dark night a blanket of quiet and stillness that wraps itself around my heart. I feel immense and tiny at the same time.

I see the snow topped outline and the lake, mirror like. I want to dive in, to be immersed, to lose and find myself. I can feel you are close but we are not yet as one. I rage and shout at the sky to show me the way. My screaming abates, the aching intensifies. My heart is pumping hard, heaving in my chest, expanding, exploding.

But now I am gliding over the glass-like waters, dancing as if my life depended on it, maybe it does. I am following the river upstream, trying, again. So much trying, so much effort, it tires me. I return to simple yearning, simple body prayer. Letting my heart be as it is.

In any given moment I either know that we are one or I’m desperately trying to find you or when I am blessed by grace I let my aching heart bring me back to you. Such is the landscape of my longing, vast empty spaces and places where the fires are always burning.

Burning up with my desire to hear the roar of your silence, smouldering for the peace you bring me.
You are home to me, my only true home. There are places where the stars are just out of reach, I can almost touch them sometimes and other times they are so distant that even my tears cannot drown the sorrow in the centre of me.

But there is a flow and ebb, a pattern to all of this. It’s as if I am on a swing, I swing close to you sometimes and we hold hands and I feel the warmth of your breath caress my body and soul. Then there I go, back the other way, my hand trailing behind me, not wanting to let go. “Don’t leave me” “don't abandon me now”. But I know that it is I that leaves, it is I that has not learnt to trust your embrace. Slowly, slowly I swing by more often, visiting, staying a little longer. One day I will stay forever like you do. And we will be one, and I will stop pretending we are two.