Desireless, Desired Action

“You wasted my time! You wasted my time! This is the worst day ever!”
My son screams in panic after an idyllic time eating dinner on the river bank and throwing stones in the water.

It’s getting dark and time to leave but he didn’t get to go to the playground.

This is a very new thing that he's been saying.
“You wasted my time.”

I found myself telling him, “I understand that you feel panic and upset that we aren’t going to get to do what you want but that doesn't have to take away from the good time you just had. It doesn't have to be a waste.”

I'm laughing at my hypocrite self as I'm saying this knowing full well this is probably the number one thing I yell at myself about internally about EV-ER-Y SIN-GLE DAY.

The dreaded threat of having to say, I wasted my time.

I
wasted
my
time.

(today? yesterday? this afternoon? my whole life?)
all of the above.

Even today, I got to a stunning fall midwest park by 9am and walked around with panic-

"What do I do with this energy, with this time?"

I spent the first two hours listening to music and taking photos.
It was refreshing and super interesting because I usually don't feel compelled to take nature photos that often. But photographing with no purpose, with no inherent dynamics of people relationships at play, just pure flow from the alchemy of music and light and air and decaying flowers and gorgeous dead leaves.

Bliss.

Then my neck started to hurt from all the contorting I was doing with the picture taking. Ending this rush of creative energy meant my focus was ALLLLLLLL over and didn’t have anywhere to flow now. (I couldn’t possibly just walk in silence.)

There are so many books I have yet to read. So many experiences I have yet to have. So many of them require space and I have that right now so what’s next?!

I moved on to listen to guided meditations.

PAINFUL. (at first)

I reeeeeeeeallly have to find my vibe in order to get on board. (side note- it is so hard for me to find meditations I enjoy that I make my own and will be uploading them here for paid subscribers. You can access my free meditations on InsightTimer here. )

Then I found one I really enjoyed that ended up quoting one of my favorite poets-

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves."
-Rainer Maria Rilke

and then another meditation followed with a quote from another I love-

"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."
-Alan Watts

By this time I’m done meditating- I just want to read.

So then I started reading and of course, I opened to a passage that I read and immediately was like, “Oh my God, I have to talk about this.”

I read two pages more and I couldn't bare it.
I had to stop and decided I was going to scurry away to a more removed park bench and talk to you about this.

This is from Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry-

“Poetry is a river. Many voices travel in it. Poem after poem moves along in the exciting crest and falls of the river waves. None is timeless. Each arrives in historical context. Almost everything in the end passes, but the desire to make a poem and the world's willingness to receive it, indeed the world's need of it, these never pass.

If it is all poetry, and not just one's own accomplishment, that carries one from this green and mortal world, that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise- then perhaps one has the sensibility, a gratitude apart from authorship,
a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.”

None is timeless, but the desire to make a poem.
And the willingness to receive it. These never pass.

This struck me.
The desire.
The desire to make a poem.
And the desire to be touched by a poem.

Right before I started reading, I was listening to a meditation specifically on desireless action. I chose that meditation because yesterday I wrote a note on Substack-

if no one was ever able to see…

if it would never serve anyone…

if it never led to anything…

if my body’s need for oxygen was replaced with a requirement to create only what sustains my spirit in order to stay alive-

what would I be doing right this minute?

What came to me after my previous thought and what I read collided has given me a renewed sense of power and relief…

But first- after tracing back that thread, I want to take a moment to note how important, and obvious, and clear it is that we create and encounter life whether we are consciously meaning to or not.

The choice to place attention on something one morning, can expands and travel for a lifetime.

I encountered something that inspired what I wrote, I then chose a meditation based on that title because I was more aware of that topic. Then I'm reading a passage and linked a concept that could help me live my whole life better.

When you give yourself the space and time to meander on what actually interests you, it opens.
it just comes.
magnetism.
magically, mundane manifestation.

We don't have to vilify desire.
(perhaps we just need to relocate it.)

I know non attachment is important,
but non attachment can also feel like we have to be non human neutral zombie beings just completely okay with whatever happens and not strive for anything specific- I know that’s not the point.

I believe the point is to distill your life down to the point where your desireless action is filled with desire in and of itself.

The invitation?

Find the place where your deepest desire IS the action that is available to you right now.

Whatever you're striving for, whatever goal you have actually isn't actually the end desire anyway.

Go layers beneath it until you get to the core of why you want that thing and what you believe is going to make you feel.

For example:
If I want gallery representation, if that is the desire, the desire might be to feel validated in my vision. I want to feel deeply seen and understood.

I can give that to myself.

What action can I take right now that is seeing and understanding myself?

Creating art.
Journaling.
Making a picture.
It could be self publishing a book, not waiting to be seen or recognized and validated externally.

Whatever, whatever it is- transmute an end goal desire into something you can give yourself right now.

As I always say, the picture, although the most precious thing in the world, it doesn't matter.

What matters is the alchemy of what ignited inside of you that created that exchange, that created the event, that creation of the image, the meaning that it is infused with and emits- the iterations that follow, the ripple effect.

It all comes from this nucleus of concentrated truth.

It’s not that we can’t have an end goal or desire.

It’s not doing something FOR an end goal or a desire for it to become something else.

It’s doing it for the sake of life,
for the sake of breath,
for the sake of compulsion.
Because there is no other option.
There's no plan B.

There is only I am alive and my heart is beating and there's air in my lungs and I must create.

It makes me think about cute aggression.
My neighbor's grandbaby smiled at me the other day, and the noises that came out of my body were horrifying.

I just couldn't even deal with the smile of this child. There are no words. The innocence, the purity, the joy, the love- immediate reaction.

There's no room for strategy.
There's no room for overthinking.
There's no room for conditional circumstance.
It's just unconditional life that erupts from something that reacts in truth.

Desireless action.

Think about what you want- what you desire, and dial it back until that same kernel of truth is an action of desire.

Prune it until it is desire and action all at once.

If we harness our actions into pure desire, then we don't withhold that feeling and that craving until we achieve a thing.
We feel it all along.
We live our life the whole time.
We don't hold our breath until we get to the thing.

And holding your breath is going to make it a fuck ton of a lot harder to get to the thing.

And when you hold your breath until you get to the thing,

it usually never feels worth it.

What's worth it is right now, I'm looking up in the sky, and there are leaves falling, twirling, and glowing, and sparkling, until they gently land in the grass.
Raining glimmers of yellow and red and orange against a blue sky.

What more can I ask of myself than to actually see that right now?

Close your eyes and let them open on something right in front of you, right now.

Yes, that.
Whatever that is.
No matter how disenchanting.
No matter how repetitive.

Think about how that is a gift.
And think about how that fulfills a desire that you already have.
If not by the thing itself, by your reaction, your awakening to repel from it back into choice and desire.