It is timely to speak of longing.
I had many responses to last week’s missive about the inner self: the liar, the thief, the monster within – the one running around declaring ‘my’ truth and ‘my’ reality to a (not)listening world.
My truth asks nothing from me but my very own private logic, and inherent in ‘my’ truth is an unspoken ‘versus’. My truth versus ‘your’ truth.
This is an expression of what psychologist and Freud contemporary Alfred Adler called ‘private logic’. Private logic versus community feeling. For Adler, the rising of private logic is a recipe for disaster – in technical terms, neurosis.
Below the loud voice within proclaiming ‘my truth’ to the world, is a quieter voice, the whisper within. Whereas the ‘inner self’ has all the loud words she can muster to her embattled defence, the whisper within is pre-language.
The whisper within is the flutter in your belly, the warm breath on your skin, the quickening in your heartbeat. She’s not loud, she’s not angry. If she has words they are few. She knows no truth but the universal.
She is the quiet summons within that says ‘this’.
The ‘this’ is always an expression of longing.
And for the record, longing is not its synonyms: desire, yearning, wanting, wishing. Longing is none of these things.
Longing has no salve, no satisfaction in the getting. Longing is its own saviour.
Longing is an unfurling. To answer the summons within is to lay out a path on which to travel, each step along the way revealed by the step just taken.
This is pilgrimage. The pilgrim answers the summons, the flutter, the warm breath, the quickening within. The pilgrim surrenders to the mystery that remains a mystery. It is the step forward that matters.
On pilgrimage we walk the turning wheel, we language the call of the soul/psyche. What is this ‘this’ that haunts my living days? What is this ‘this’ that will not leave my waking and shows up in my dreaming?
Pilgrimage – walking and writing the turning wheel – is the immersive work of languaging longing.
Ultreia.
Acknowledging the art of Hilma af Klimt, who sought to capture the unfurling within.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist, author, researcher and founder of the International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute. In 2014 she launched The Write Road, a wellbeing-through-writing initiative for rural and remote Australians. She is passionate about pilgrimage, and in 2017 initiated Walk&Write holiday writing adventures.