longing.

an ancestral possession.

Longing is the Mother of us all. Maybe one of our most ancient ancestors.

And when I say that I mean everything was born from something’s longing. Longing is the imprint of oh my god, I want, I need. Or I must have. It’s a fire within the body that becomes life breath, shake, sweat, multiple. The evolution, the everything there is in order to be anything at all.

Longing is the only reason we are here.

4 million years ago longing brought us home, or took us from our home, or lusted us into this existence. Gravity longed for gas and dust. Gas and dust ached for asteroids and the ardor of asteroids forced them to be something they knew they were, what they could really be, or something they used to be. A faded streak of a memory across the galaxy, they wanted a piece of what was leftover of that. And then something, and… I have no name for this, but Something longed for even more. Organisms desired more shapes. More form. Memory banks and record keeping. They wanted wetness. Bitterness. Fecundity. They wanted a function. They wanted to merge and split. Redistribute. A purpose. A home. An earth— a place to be viral, bacterial, cellular, in love and expand within love. They wanted to converge, weave and braid with the strands of networks they longed into possibility, they longed to belong to each other. 

That belonging made way for clay to settle and shift and form and for its eventual upheavals, frustrations, outgrowing the dry layer of its wet skin. Plates under gooey, sticky places got achey and filled with longing, and erected itself into fire filled volcanos. Volcanoes then longed to be expressed, their special kind of love meets rage. That longing pressed and pressured until it was too much to handle, too much to hold, to much to be, and needed to be seen. So it exploded orgasmically all over the place. Covered. Hot. Alchemized. Lavic. The volcanic fire longed to land inside water. To cool. To find yin-like enveloping of love. Or water wanted fire, water lapped and waved for vocalanic fires to ejaculate sediment all over her soft, dark floor. Landing, embedding, becoming. Or they wanted to be together, equally, but didn’t know how. Their longing was complicated one. How does one bring two very different elements together without eradicating the other? What a primal longing: for water and fire to weave heat and wet. So they merged as best as they could, lava sediments settled deep on the ocean’s perineum and made new material, a flavorful, sassy love baby of their longing. They made salt together.

Salt became something else, something strange and of its own volition it longed for more than just the sea.  Salt became hapeophiles that made ocean creatures that could eventually crawl out of water and explore new terrain in it’s new form. And on land they longed for wombs to fill and tears hold them, they longed for feelings and tongues. And somewhere down the road, they became critters that dined on the threads of connections because longing is hunger and hunger is longing. And then they became our grandmother whales who walked out of the sea and who then became wild wolves.  Or did wolves come first and they became whales? Either way they all became witches, with the wombs and the tears, and they longed fuck and spill milk, spell relationships into existence. So they became our grandmothers in caves spiraling us into being.  Under moons. Casting magic into our skin tones, our eye colors, the way our hips were shaped. Spells are longing to bring something back to life. To bring the ache into form.

Eventually. Maybe. You can decide. I make things up but inside, I remember. 

I wonder if I long to be gas and dust again. To become salt. Too long for the sun to return home. Or to be a volcano seeking the love of the water. Or to just remember any way of being here and human other than what is. 

I thought everything about writing this, about seeking ancestral soil, literal and inbody, was me wanting more, something different, something else. Something I never knew. But what is embedded in this long journey, of longing, in general. It's a memory. A memory of something you cannot touch but once had, something that awakens the original mother, memories of her.  Longing — before you actually merge or encounter where it brings you— or longing what you used to have but cannot return to—  is an imprint. An imprint of every moment of existence, within you. How do you know you want it — this  4 million year ago evolution of crashing cosmic lust, if you have never had it. Longing is the forgotten child of what we already had, but lost, somehow. Taken. Given away.  We don’t long for what we don’t know. Or don’t have some cellular memory of. We didn’t long for then, when we had it, —  because it was us. But our wanting more, moved us away from it. Longing is probably why we forgot in the first place and carried us, in its amnesiac chariot to more shape making, more change making. But also, maybe longing is just a beautiful lover in itself. Longing is eros. The being with what we want. The ache that throbs in our low, low belly. 

Do we really want or need more…can we actually get what we long for? Or would that eradicate creation, god, all that is: longing? What if we longed and stayed with the ache, and just stared at the snow that has clung to the fanning needles of the white pines, looked at the slush that has formed pools on the basketball court, and the ice that has glittered  naked leafless branches of red berried bushes out the window and said, this is enough. This is enough. 

But does spring come without longing for it? 

What if I wanted that stranger on the bus, day in and day out, throbbing crotch, hot ears, beating heart. Day in and day out, longing. But I never went to them. Did not follow the arrow. Did not take. Just pined for them. Dreamed of them. What if we did nothing for our desires? But let them be. And nothing comes from it, but the wanting, and in its natural state, we just dance with it, the longing, and the longing becomes the medicine. The longing becomes the belonging.

 We are so uncomfortable in the grief and and hustle to fill the holes it has drilled in us, and we do so quickly— we try and become more, find more, fill more. I get it.  And in the most unnatural state, or maybe the most natural but dangerous way of being is that we attain what we long for. This is “success”. We satiate the hunger that our longing brings and get what we want.

What happens when longing becomes desire and that desire becomes extraction and that becomes greed and greed becomes us, becomes death, now, here. We got what we wanted. So what now? We want more. Longing. Loss. Grief. It’s taken us to levels of  insanity with un-belonging. We are insane in our longing now. Rightfully so. Look around at what we have been left with. Is being taken by longing a delicious or harmful state of existence? Is it the primal urge of creation or the colonial urge to expand everywhere and devour everything?

Or what if longing was just a map. A way back home, backwards, forwards, under,  a creature to feed, alive as is. A sentient being. A Saint Longing.  Our God Longing. A daunting, haunting spirit that just wants to be seen. Create an altar for it. Give it bowls of milk. Ask it to be gentle with you. And let it be. What if that was what we don’t know how to do? Tend to the altar of longing without seeking more than what is. 

Personally, I want to make feasts for my longing. I want and then want more. I wanted to know more about who I was, why I was here, alive, still breathing, raising my daughters- people who will someday become ancestors in the soil, and maybe have children walking here. I longed to know who was dead inside me and what kind of dead people made me, and made my children. I wanted to know what stories might need to be told, or remembered. I long for plants I could smell but could never name. Spells I could hear in my sleep but never utter in waking. I wanted the ancient secrets. I wanted to find out something spectacular - horrible or delightful.  I wanted, if I can be honest, to feel something different than whatever this was.  I thought I might uncover some secret in knowing how to be better at being alive, better at dying, better at not being an asshole. Better than the year 2016.   How to be better, together, when everything felt as if it was falling apart. Or how to be better at just falling apart. Falling off. Going mad all at once. 

People think ghosts are spirits that live elsewhere. In the sky. In the woods. In the attic of the home. In the closet under the stairs. But they are not. They live in us. We let them in just by being born and deciding to long for our first breath.

Longing is a specific kind of ghost that possesses us. I like to be possessed by it. It’s the only thing that has gotten me to sit down and write this. 

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Longing was my grandmother. Salvatrice.

She longed for food. Her dead mother. Maybe she longed for shelter. For safety. For shoes for her feet. For the lemon groves and the wheat fields that provides nourishment for her, not for the others who came down and took them over.  Maybe she longed for the volcano to stop pressing and pushing out fire and smoke and longed for it to stop creating steam with the sea. Maybe she longed for sweets. Honey dripping. Fried pastry. Sheep cream filled. Maybe she longed for a cow of her own. Or a hillside to wander across without threat of the men who longed for young girls, who took them, raped them, and then forced them to be their wives.

Maybe she longed for me, without knowing, maybe her longing was me. Maybe she longed for lakes of red where she could throw herself into and be devoured by Hades, like the myths that were passed on. Maybe being entirely devoured and eaten by the chthonic was a longing that never was severed. That I carry still.

Longing was her father. Giuseppe.

He longed for land. For eggplants as big as donkeys and sage hens the size of sheep and eggs as grand and round as the boulders he climbed on the hillside and laid against to nap, soaking in the sun he longed to infuse his body with vitamin D.

He longed to own the trees that held the fruits of  beautiful sparkling coins, when you picked one, another grew back.  He longed for an orchard of those coin trees. He Streets lined neatly with golden bricks, one after the other, packing a pathway, leading to a home, with a porch, with running water. With onions and tomatoes from a garden that were so huge just one would feed the whole village. Maybe he longed for his daughter to read and write and to be un-cursed by the evil eye brought by others, wanting her, wanting the land, wanting the lemons and the wheat. Maybe his longing was nameless, or didn’t know it yet. As he climbed to the highest point on the mountain. With a stone in his mouth. And at the top laid it against the shrine for the Mother, a small statue carved from the granite under their feet, a statue pinned with ex voto and coral strung prayers, and chunks of hair wrapped in linen. Maybe he sat before Her, shoeless, hopeless, belly empty, hands broken into cracks filled with earth and dried blood and he just longed. Longed. Maybe his longing was so invasive, so impassioned, so foreign, so primal or so new, so permeating that he thought it must be the Mother telling him to go, go. Leave the island.  Find what else was out there. Maybe his longing was born from visions born from notes of the new world, propaganda prints hung on the village streets, an invitation to all. From who? We don’t know. They were printed with: Come. Come to the new world where your longings will be met. Where your hunger will be fed. Where your children will be read. Where there are still barrels of olives and space for you to hang cheeses and rivers made of deep purple wine and land so fertile that volcano ash is unneeded. Come to the new world. It is all yours. All yours, come take.

And that invitation merged within him like gas and dust. Became the longing of an asteroid that must push across space and time to be something he knew, he remembered, he could be.. And maybe that was where this kind of longing was born. And maybe that was the longing that was born into me. And why am I here. Still taken by it. An ancestor that is still feeding on me.