A Longing Hope

We must decide in the end what is we are looking for.  “What is it you seek?”  All the sages have started with that question.  All great myths start there. But there is a related question, and one that may precede it: “Do you want to get well?” We must decide if we want to go on the journey, and we must decide how we will do so.

The questions are deeply connected. For what makes us ultimately unwell is that we do not have (or may not know) what it is we seek.  What is missing?  We know vaguely that something is.  That a whole other world awaits us.  But we are just not sure how to get there.  Not yet.

But we know there must be something more!

And we are called to enter that mystery.  Before we know what it is.  We are required to believe in it.  To trust.  To accept its reality, before we have seen it.  To walk the streets with no name.  To belong to the true country, long before it is established on this earth.

It does exist.  It IS real!  We have moments of transcendence to prove it.  We all have.  But those moments are fleeting, bound to the temporal…for now.  We can not stay in those moments, or keep them. But the brief encounters are enough, and have done their work. Our imaginations are whetted, our belief aroused.

There really is more.  And the more is real.  More real than what we can see. An invisible world haunts our physical one.  It incarnates it, impregnates it with the potency of a life yet to be experienced here.  But it’s like there is some filter, or mechanical governor, that keeps us from receiving too much from this other world yet.

This filter stabilizes our experience in this life..  It restricts in one sense, but protects in another.  It helps regulate our intake of beauty and truth so that we can digest them.  And at the same time it reminds us there is infinitely more where that came from.

We are limited, but not stuck.  There is a huge difference.  Within what we can experience there is more than enough to explore, create, and share - though in a pacing decidedly not our own.  We can not dictate the amount, so we must learn to listen, to curate the inspiration drawing us in.

That is the real power of the artist.  Knowing the language of the Creative Spirit.  Listening well.  Knowing when she is speaking.  Learning the pace, trusting the timing.  Knowing we will be led us to the place we are wanting to go. 

We must have an escort.  There is no way in alone.  Even though we must be alone to find it.  That is the necessary isolation of the artist.  But we must not stay alone.  We must learn to enter this other world and come back out.  That is the pattern, the yoke we must learn.

We become translators.  We visit what is currently invisible, and bring it back to our visible, temporal world.  These translations are important work.  Our world is very broken.  Tired.  Hurt.  Prone to suspicion of any longings for glory.

Yet also desperate for hope.  Desperate for meaning.  Desperate to have some translation of our deep sorrow.  Desperate to find voicing to our longing for a better world, a longing that ironically contains the very thing that will sustain our human spirit.

Where can we find such longing hope in this world?  We can not.

That is the bottom line.  What we are ultimately looking for does not exist here.  On this plane.  Not yet. That is why art is essential - to draw our gaze upon a glory not of this world, even through the most simple of portals: You.