Can We Talk About Wanting?

So we can find what was never lost.

Hello Beautifuls!

Welcome to all of you who are new here this week!

And welcome back to everyone who’s been here before. I am honored and deeply moved by this community and how we’re creating a space that is real and raw and also full of love and wisdom.

It is all of you who are making this community what it is.

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Thank you to everyone who read and commented and restacked last week’s post. I’m truly delighted by all of you—even the readers who are quiet, I feel you too.

xoxo

j

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The current display of collected things on my coffee table. If you come over for tea, I’ll make room for the cups.

Today I have thoughts, questions and a poem for you.

I’ve been thinking so much lately about wanting. 

Wanting to be in California while I am still here in Texas, my intuition telling me the time is almost here, but not yet. My body and brain telling me they are also not yet ready for the rigors of buying a house, packing all the tiny delicate things I love (I am a collector of nests and other fragile dried things like allium blossoms and yucca stalks) and packing all the books and all the vases and, well, if you’ve ever moved, you know what I mean. But even as I write this, I feel the creep of excitement moving through my heart and I know the gap between me and this particular want coming to fruition is closing.

Wanting it to be fall, so I can wear more than a tank top and shorts. Oh how I miss jeans, for they are my clothing soul mate. I love a good dress, as we’ve talked about here, and I love a good pair of flowy pants, but if you asked me the desert island question about clothes, I would take my jeans.

Wanting clothes in general. I love clothes, their texture, their design, their feel, how I look in them, we’ve talked about that here too. If I had endless money, I would also have endless clothes. 

Wanting my body to be different than it is.

Diana Strinati Baur

wrote a beautiful and powerful essay on beauty and our right to aging last week, and her words helped me move an inch closer to allowing my body to be beautiful not for how it looks, but for how it feels, how it moves, how it has carried me through these 50 years and three months, how it is strong and willing to do most everything I ask of it. And how, as I move into this middle part of my life, I want to be at peace with my body, at peace with what it can do and what I might no longer push it to do, which includes something I very much want—to have the strength to do a jump through and jump back through a vinyasa sequence in ashtanga yoga.

But lately I’ve been wondering what it would be like to explore wanting, to want without need of receipt.

I realize this is a very privileged stance, I do not want for any basic needs. I have food, shelter, supportive and loving relationships. So I am talking about the more ambiguous wants of being human, of desire, not sexual, but sensual, textural, mental, emotional.

I wonder if there is something more to wanting. Like how, when we fully feel our anger or sadness or rage, we are able to start releasing ourselves from it, we are able to find a way through it, instead of repeating it. Could it be the same with wanting? Can I explore the feeling of wanting in a way that I haven’t yet reached, so that I can stop wanting quite so much?

Which makes me ask myself why do I want to stop wanting? And do I? Or do I want to allow myself to want so fully, so deeply, that I am awash in it, filled with it and it changes into something that feels more like love.

I wrote this poem in response to a Letters from Love prompt on what Love would have us know about our ancestors.

SINGING THE STORIES

You will dig
and you will toss the extra dirt to the side
your hot hands slipping 
on the slick wood of the shovel

you think you will use the pile of dirt, later
so it sits waiting, as you fill the hole with other things
and still it yawns

Until one day, tired and sweating
your hands blistered and scabbed with blood

You climb up on your mound of dirt
to look down in the hole 
for something you have lost

and you ask aloud
When did it slip from my hands?
Where did I make the mistake?

And you realize 
you are standing on the answer

For it was never about the hole 
or what you put in it

It was about what you took out
and kept

and what you could now see
from way up there

the stars
the oceans
the rivers
the trees

your ancestors

for we dwell in everything 

waiting for your gaze, your touch, your attention
to set us free

so we can sing you the stories
that you have always wanted to hear

so you can find what was never lost.

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Do you have something physical you wish you could do? Something you want to stop wanting, or want to allow yourself to want more? Have you experienced a deep dive into wanting, so deep it turns into something else?

As always, I am so looking forward to your wisdom, experiences, feelings and close reads*.

With so much love,

Jocelyn

xo

*Close reads are a thing we do in the

Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

space. It’s a way for us to connect with another’s piece of work: poem, fiction, essay, and take a close look at what’s happening between the lines, in the spaces and rhythms of the work, in what is said and not said, in word choice and juxtaposition. It’s a way we learn by reading and really looking, really noticing the piece.

Anyone is welcome to do a close read, the only rules are kindness and sticking to what worked, not what didn’t. ❤️

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These videos are of Laruga Glaser, one of the highest level ashtanga teachers in the world. In the first short clip, she does a simple jump through and back and it’s just beautiful, the strength and control and relationship she has with her body. It’s also fun to watch the more showy version of the jump through in the second video - she does the move in the first 12 seconds and the rest of the video is just instructional. Something also of note, these videos were made 16 years apart and she has been practicing for nearly 30 years.

I couldn’t resist putting this one in too. If you enjoy watching people do quiet movements of grace and strength with their bodies, this is for you.

I almost cried with longing as I watched this last one. And I’ve seen it before. I’m trying to pin down the want here, and I think it has to do with being able to open my body so much that it can bend into these poses, and to opening my mind so much that it believes they are possible, then opening up my heart to the possibility that I am allowed to try.