Desire lines
We all have words that seem to come up, over and over, traversing our heart and mind until they create personal desire lines - a path to follow and a direction of travel.
You know the ones. You read them somewhere in passing, on a billboard or the last line of a novel or a poem etched into someone’s wall and then you forget you ever read it, forget that goosebumps rose and you paused for a few electric seconds, before returning to the email or the door or the busy street.
Days or weeks or many years later they eventually reappear and with the passing of time hit a little differently, in new and more profound ways.
This is the one that reappears for me, unbidden, with every heartbreak.
“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”
- Nayyirah Waheed
These are the words that come up sometimes when I read the news - more and more often in the last couple of years.
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
- James Baldwin
This is the one that arrived this week.
What is the more beautiful question?
This is a concept eloquently conceived by the poet David Whyte, who says
“The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it, as it does by having it answered.”
I think we are asking a lot of questions at the moment.
Why does the gleeful misogyny surrounding the PM feel more and more physically sickening?
When is the next 1pm presser and what is the plan?
How many summer days do we get, before we have to let go this collective held breath?
When do I stock up on groceries and what about masks and will work be okay and oh god I have to book a booster and did I remember to get games for the kids?
Am I going to survive this?
It seems to me these are all excellent questions, and to anyone whose mind is feeling like mine - like that horrible tilt-a-whirl ride at Rainbow’s End that leaves you feeling like you need to frantically brace - even after you are supposedly on solid ground - I see you - in the questions and in the answers that will come.
There are questions below the surface to dig for, too, to close our hands around in this unbeautiful moment as we work out what our new identity is and begin to understand that we are simply too far past the threshold to return to what we once were.
Why is it that we are so prepared for our governments to fail us that we accept it the moment it happens?
Why is it that we are loudly despairing of the inability of less progressive parties but collectively accept mediocre progressive politics?
What is being lost, in this moment?
How will we be found?
Desire lines are the paths worn by our feet into the most easily navigated route between our origin and our destination - in an entirely different pattern to the path laid out for us by others.
To me it profoundly represents what happens when we start to travel in the direction we most want to go - the world can’t help but shift for us.
We remake our path, one step at a time.
“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learnanything or anyone
that does not bring you aliveis too small for you.”
- David Whyte