ORIGINS: On Divine Yearning

Notes on the feminine desire for hunger

Yearn: to Long; to Pine; to Covet; to Ache

“Eve” by Solomon Joseph Solomon R.A., P.R.B.A

Everything sacred begins with a graceful, yielding submission to desire. My fingers reach toward her, hoping that the press of my fingers against her skin will drench mine in the nectar of the universe. If I could just press my lips to the side of her neck I’d be able to sip from that pool until I’m filled up. With what? I have nothing but desire to know.

I have no hope of quenching my thirst, but only to drown in it.

I knew that this wasn’t going to fit nicely into my life. Neatly, organized, like a box. There were so many roles she filled in my life, and I was going to ask for one more. From coworker to best friend’s best friend to friend to… girlfriend? To my first real relationship at 30 years old? How much can one ask of another person? Of the universe? How many slots can one person fill in your life before you both buckle under the weight?

I knew, objectively, that I owed myself a chance at discovering myself sexually and romantically with women, but I’d vowed never to do so a long time ago. I’d severed myself from that longing should it ever arise. I’d broken its kneecaps and left it crippled on the floor in a college dorm room.

But the story was coming together. Months of avoiding her, of misinterpreting the discomfort I felt in her presence, of confusing annoyance that my roommate invited her over to our apartment every single day.

So I sat across from her, our knees facing each other, on my carpeted apartment floor. Suppressing my longing, I kept my hands clasped tightly in my lap, gripping each other like they would wander if given the option. They no longer felt a part of me, but something near enough to be familiar but foreign enough to be untrustworthy and unwieldy. They operated under no known set of rules or convictions, strangers to the rest of my body. They had accepted, had embodied, something my brain and heart were still processing.

Her hair was cropped short, curly, and would soon be half-shaved in the back. She wore her keys in a carabiner on her jeans. She wore ripped jeans, a fitted black t-shirt, and tattoos that climbed their way up her arms and behind her ears.

She wore her smirk like she wore her knowledge about me and my ignorance of it, as a shield between us. This shield was a challenge. I had to decide if I was a fighter, if I could fight for the desire and wanting and yearning deep that wanted to break free. If I was strong enough to withstand its cascade whether it be a clear waterfall or pulsing bloodloss.

I felt like every breath, every sentence, every word, every action was a betrayal of my emotions. I was drenched in vulnerability, the softest and most scared parts of myself exposed to some goddess of the universe, the sacred mother, beautiful and terrible and fierce and unforgiving. I was clawing myself out. I was caged like a rabid animal. The cage was the cause of my insanity, but it had protected me for so long. I have always found my peace in self-abandonment.

But for the first time my attraction to someone felt good. Pure. Full of light. I was terrified, but not of her. I was scared of how muchness this feeling was. Of how much I wanted her. Of how much admiration, adoration, and awe I felt in her presence. Not just of her, but of my capacity to feel so much.

Her eyes made me look down, away, gone. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted.

Wanting was familiar. Desire, pining, craving, longing. For the last 30 years all of these had overgrown within me until their thorns punctured my skin, searching for sunlight. From conception onward I’ve lived my life for more, which contrasted with my starving reality of desperation. While all I’ve ever wanted was more, I stood firmly in the quicksand of disbelief. I don’t usually get what I want. This was the mantra I repeated to her.

I learned early that yearning was synonymous with loneliness. Lonely for company, fulfillment, purpose, and passion. Desiring something meant you were unsatisfied with what you had. The womb of scarcity births desire. If you are denied in your calls for acceptance, love, and care you find a way to survive without it. I had stuffed myself into the darkness of contentment, trying to force the grief of loss out of my life.

Society mocked me for my grief and my rage and my desires, which I felt intensely, as though my world was going to burn down. I spent so much time exorcising that yearning from my body, confining it with chains or feeding it to the wolves. I had learned that my wanting would drive me mad with loss, and instead of framing longing as my birthright, a compass for my soul, it was framed as a single-lane highway to despair.

Women have been tempted since the beginning of time. For most of my life this was a fearful reality, and it was buried under layers of social propriety. The cycles of desire and yearning possessed by Eve were at best a nature that must be brought to submission or at worst a temptation from the devil. Desiring what didn’t belong to you, what you hadn’t earned, what wasn’t possible, was a wasteful time suck. Pining was wasteful, immoral, impractical and, at worst, a cavalier discarding of our singularly precious resource- time. There was nothing to be gained in the cyclical nature of longing, of seeking.

As if our world could be so finite. As if my desire for comfort, oneness, and sacred union could be anything but a desire to melt into oneness with the universe. To live less in fearful blinding ignorance and touch the sacred core of the world. As if women weren’t ripped from the universe with the purpose of having a brief hauntingly laughingly life as a human before returning home, and to seek that is to be human. Perhaps we were ripped from our otherworld just to try and find our way back.

As I chain myself and my hands on my apartment floor, a part of me recognizes that touching her would feel closer to the circulation of the universe than anything I’ve ever felt before.

For what is closer to the core of the universe than that where life begins? Where souls cross their barriers into our world? Is not touching a woman, being inside a woman, as close as we can get to what lies beyond? Are her moans of pleasure at being seen, felt, shattering, and taken beyond this plane of existence as close as we can get to the shaking bliss of eternal enlightenment? Is our birthright not to hunt, search, fight, and sink into the desire for it? That the point, in any of it, is the yearning itself?

Is the female birthright made of curiosity, desire, and the lip-bitten ecstasy of imagination?

For her entire existence was a temptation to me. Lush, warm, receptive, strong, powerful. Changing like a river, and steady like one too. I felt myself altering just by her presence, the world opening like a blossom. Once the flood of choices made itself clear, I was powerless against its waterfall.

For a moment I attached myself to its blocks. For a moment I dammed it, secured it, let it be pushed down into the depths of me. But with each rise I let it move through me more and more until it was unstoppable. And god, I was so tired. I could no longer hold a waterfall at bay with my weary body. My water-beaten soul stopped trying, sacred surrender coming frostbitten to my fingertips.

Atlas shrugged and found peace.

Because with each pulse I felt what my attraction to her wasn’t. I realized that it didn’t feel like it was coming from me. It felt like it was moving through me, as if something greater than myself was using me as a vessel. Her, at the time inevitable, rejection of me wasn’t going to be a reflection of my worth, because none of this seemed to be about me anymore. It was about me embodying love through my adoration of her. And my adoration of her was a reflection of my adoration of women, and myself, as a whole. It represented my commitment to the act of Love, of Desire, of Truth.

When she redirected my Love away from her, it wouldn’t be a reflected of the inadequacy of my love. It would be a mirror reflecting it towards what was most aligned with my soul.

All I could do was love honestly, completely, truthfully. And let that point me in the right direction, let what I wanted and desired and loved show me the pathway forward. Let my adoration of her bring me closer to Love and Truth, and let that be enough.

To no longer let self-abandonment be my peace, but to find my peace in following the illuminated pathway of my desire.

Now my body is a pulse of want. My womb, my core roars, churning and frothing at the mouth, desperate to be released, to be dipped into, to be pulled forth into the light. I am a vessel, a channel, for divine yearning. I yearn for God, for the wisdom and perpetual being of the universe. To be met deeply at the heart and be penetrated by God. These words cleanse my throat chakra with every cadence and soliloque.

I am made of desire. It is my birthright, my firm foundation, and my path.

And, when I directed my Love and Truth and Divine Yearning toward her, she beamed in its light and and welcomed me in with laughter and ecstacy and claimed me as hers.

And I let myself… touch.