But then when I sat down and started to think about it, I realized, that I am actually tapping into a longing that probably has never had its realized counterpart in this visible world...
It felt utterly strange, finding myself crying for something as if I had lost it, then only to realize that I actually have not yet experienced it... kind of a deja' vu the other way round...
The poets of old thought that we are born with a tie to heaven that then causes us to be longing for something ... but maybe there is a dream embedded in our hearts, regardless of where it came from that pulls us and draws us with an irresistible longing... and if we try to kill that longing or bury it, we become less alive and less ourselves in doing so...
I think I have been born with this longing for something gloriousn and sparkling and great, involving a lot of laughter, love, harmony, mirth, dancing, contentment and good food. Something like a huge party involving everyone I know... a gigantic Street Party of sorts! I think that is what I have secrectly being trying to create with every single party I've ever given... soon it's the time for a new one, trying to capture a bit more of that!
William Wordsworth said in his Ode to Immortality that he thinks our longing is something we knew in childhood, the sense of endless possibilities calling us to explore... (I love the idea that we come to the world "trailing clouds of glory"), but that it then dies a bit by the light of the "common day". I think I was born with more glitter and glimmer to just buy into the creed of common days! I'm not sure there are any.
On the other hand, maybe it was Mrs Wordsworth who had to change all the diapers etc while her hubby busy was poetisezing (i.e. writing poems ;) and so she might have another opinion of the gloriousness of babies and what they come trailing...
Be that as may... in any case, there is a longing in me which I cannot but wonder about, is it a "has been" or a "not-yet-here" thing that it targets?
| Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: | |
| The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, | 60 |
| Hath had elsewhere its setting, | |
| And cometh from afar: | |
| Not in entire forgetfulness, | |
| And not in utter nakedness, | |
| But trailing clouds of glory do we come | 65 |
| From God, who is our home: | |
| Heaven lies about us in our infancy! | |
| Shades of the prison-house begin to close | |
| Upon the growing Boy, | |
| But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, | 70 |
| He sees it in his joy; | |
| The Youth, who daily farther from the east | |
| Must travel, still is Nature's priest, | |
| And by the vision splendid | |
| Is on his way attended; | 75 |
| At length the Man perceives it die away, | |
| And fade into the light of common day. | |
