Episode Details

What do you want?

What do you really want?

The cyber Monday sales have been flashing items, workshops, experiences that we could possibly want, that we should want, that we somehow need.

In one of my Sanghas we are exploring a text called The Eight Realizations of Great Beings. This past week we have been exploring the nature of desire.

The invitation to explore is part of what I love about the Zen Buddhist tradition.

What is it like to bring a non-judgmental attention to the ordinary and natural experience of desire? To your relationship to desire?

Sometimes desire carries a lot of shame, I want things that aren’t good for me or that I was told I shouldn’t want.

Or confusion, I was told that my wanting was wrong, selfish, sinful.

Some of us may have distanced ourselves from desire. Others may feel that our desires drive our lives in unhelpful ways.

If we look closely we see that desire animates us. Desire fuels our life, seeds our dreams, feeds us, motivates many actions and can open the gate to actual pleasure, satisfaction, gratitude, compassion and connection.

This podcast is a meditation on desire. It’s an invitation to reflect on your relationship to desire and to explore how the energy of desire is linked to compassion and interconnection.

As I was reflecting on desire I listened to an interview with Bayo Akomolafe called From the Skin of Things to the Bone of Things, the interview was moving and spanned many topics at some point he posited.

I wonder what a sensuous solidarity looks like, maybe it lives somewhere between the cracks of problems and solutions. I wonder what a sensuous becoming monstrous looks like—I wonder what it means to shape-shift. I wonder what the humpless camel said as it approached the desert. It wasn’t how do I solve this desert, maybe the solution for the desert is to shape-shift, to grow humps—to become the desert.

I heard him say that and I felt a yes well up inside me. This is how desire becomes compassion, this is how longing opens to non-separation, this is how our vows intertwine with the vows of each other and the great earth.

A sensuous solidarity is another name for bodhicitta.

Deep love for all beings and this world.

To close, I’d like to share a poem by Mary Oliver. I consider this a capping phrase to this meditation on desire. An offering and a gift to a heart that is learning to love one’s self and this beautiful, heart-breaking world.

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

by Mary Oliver

I.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat

of the sweet grass?

Will the owl bite off its own wings?

Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or

forget to sing?

Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold

the reliability and the finery and the teachings

of this gritty earth gift.

II.

Eat bread and understand comfort.

Drink water, and understand delight.

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets

are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds

who are drinking the sweetness, who are

thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star

both intimate and ultimate,

and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two