Desire is not good nor bad, just unnecessary.
(Someone takes umbrage at these words. More must be said.)
We reach out our hand. There is, we think, something we desire to have.
We desire, we think, someone, something.
We are, I submit, not yet thinking.
‘Not yet’ is God’s name, is (let’s consider) what is God.
Why say this?
Because we are desire itself.
And there is nothing else. Nothing not what and who we are.
Our misapprehension is believing what we desire is other than us.
What we actually want is to be at peace with who and what we are.
That mind, the Christ mind, the Buddha mind, sees everything and everyone as-it-is.
Empty yourself.
See through desires until you see yourself, desire itself.
Originary vitality tension vibrantly arising up through all being all beings.
Empty of self, emptiness itself, whole and entire, as itself throughout creation.
Let it go.
Let it be.
Itself, no other, as it is.
Theodore Roethke’s final three lines of his poem The Manifestation are wonderful:
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire .
We come to something without knowing why.
They are koan to me.
What is equally wonderful is the whole poem:
The Manifestation
Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
The mole making its way through darkest ground,
The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil—
Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
(—from The Far Field: Last Poems, by Theodore Roethke)
Or maybe it is the final stanza of his poem In a Dark Time that asks for last say:
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind….(—from In a Dark Time, poem by Theodore Roethke)
Free...
The annoyance of what is not yet here.
