Yearning is the taste of mystery
Photo: Lorna Sim
Whenever I walk on the mountain near my house, I can sense the call of the Earth. Interestingly, I have noticed how I am greeted by a pair of birds—parrots, black cockatoos, kookaburras. They fly past me towards the mountain. I sense this as the promise of being accompanied, sometimes in ways that we may not recognise when we look for the standard ways we define company.
I smell the longing in Nature. There is longing in the call of the birds, the reaching of the trees for the sky and the open spaces of the Earth seeking embrace.
The longing or Yearning is the scent of transience. At its core it is the poignant realization that manifest life is a beautiful and fleeting experience. The timelines may range from millions of years to a few decades, but everything, from the universes to our human life, ends and transforms. Within our lives, this movement of reality manifests as endings of relationships, of life stages such as childhood and youth, and the ending of death.
When we find the aching beauty of Yearning unbearable, we narrate it out of our sensation world. We have narratives of immortality. We devalue body, Earth and the material domain of our existence. We will do anything to escape the fragility of this moment we are gifted in this beauteous place.
We speak of the essence of Reality as mystery. Yet, we spend a lot of energy trying to explain, control and unravel this mystery. Yearning is the intelligence of this mystery. It is the sensation of brevity, the anguish of wanting the certainty of permanency, the joy of the beauty we long for and the remembrance of this joy which comes from our ancient bodies.
Yearning is the not knowing, the ache for a remembered sensation and the offering of our body and expression to that sensation. It has nothing to do with destination. It has nothing to do with uniting with an object of our desires. Ancient Yearning was an incantation, a dance of passionate offering that unites us with the passion of Earth’s offering.
Our Yearning meets Her Yearning.
In Vedic poetry, the Apsaras or dancers were the Yearning bodies. They could hold Yearning because they were versed in the art of pleasure, through its language, dance. Dance transforms all sensation into beauteous expression. Apsaras flung Yearning into the world so that we can move in the same beauteous poignancy. This was an incantation because it rendered us Divine and one with Nature.
Through Yearning is unraveled our humanity. In the trembling of our Yearning bodies is the trembling of the leaves. We all know we meet and we part—the dance of Yearning is holding that Truth with beauty. When we Yearn in this way, we are always accompanied by Nature, by the cosmos, and by our own sensations.
When we dance Yearning, we hold Reality in the vessel of its mystery. Everything else falls into place. We are humanised.