The light has been returning, as the days grow longer again and we set the clocks forward, and so has my equilibrium and happiness — unresolved tensions with Ted notwithstanding. (Per some breaking gossip, it appears as if he may have quit or been let go after an angry confrontation with management.)

As I continue to go on dates with strange men from the free dating site — including an extremely tall Polish Ph.D who cautions that he will “test my humanitarianism and liberalism” — it occurs to me: I don’t want any man to change this. In the past, I have identified so completely with my caustic amours that their pet miseries became (and added to) my own.

**

When I was younger, I used to think if I can just get with this or that guy, life will be complete, and I will be happy. Never mind that my interactions and conversations with that particular individual more often than not left me feeling the exact opposite. I have the unfortunate (or enviable, depending on your point of view) tendency to fall into the reality and thought-world (and depression) of other people the way one might slip on some slick tile and fall into a swimming pool. And it’s hard enough for me to climb out of my own thought-pool. It took me twenty-five years the first time.

Of course you, loyal readers, well know that one of my habits is to think everything completely to death. I went to the proper philosophy-oriented college for this, of course: the brain-wanking went on around the clock, and it was highly fashionable to be as grim as possible in one’s premises and conclusions. Somewhere along the line, I had become convinced that the truth of a thought was directly proportional to how painful it was to entertain. Perhaps because the “truth” with which I grew up depended upon the paranoid avoidance of all other, threateningly contradictory input, and facing that input and experiencing the subsequent disillusionment was painful. I felt deeply betrayed by those who had, I felt, sold me a so-called bill of goods.

Closed-minded cynicism seems to be common among kids who go through these kinds of betrayals: we tend to view the world through the prism of our personal injuries and disappointments, and take the good things for granted. What’s worse, we would rather be “right” (this time) than heal, or make the changes that might just possibly allow a thin sliver of sunlight to penetrate the gloom. Pessimism becomes a habit, a chronic disease that becomes part of our identity. We wouldn’t know who we were without our bitterness and our depression.

Funny thing is, I didn’t miss it at all when it went away.

And it’s hit me, amid all these coffee and lunch dates: I’d rather be by myself than with someone who triggers those old habits. I feel like an alcoholic might when confronted with dates who are big drinkers. I like being out of pain. I like enjoying the present moment. Simple presence — and not some constant remove from the now, the restless daydreams of a dissatisfied imagination, into which I’ve escaped since adolescence — is what saves me now, every day.

**

My saucy gay 74-year-old former monk friend, who turned me onto the contemporary English poet David Whyte, has lent me a DVD of David giving a live talk in San Francisco. During the course of the talk, David recites several of his poems with his gorgeous, resonant Yorkshire accent, including the poem “Start Close In.”

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

**

Give up on other people’s questions, he says. Don’t let them smother something simple. This is exactly the danger when, like me, you have a tendency to get derailed by other people’s realities. Especially when those “other people” are men — who tend to have better-policed boundaries and a more robust ego than I do — particularly men to whom I form some kind of romantic attachment.

“You don’t let anyone take you away from the conversation that you were born to, and that you were made for,” David cautions.

In today’s world, we should be saying “no” about three times for every “yes” that we say…a good “no” says that there’s a bigger “yes” to be said…and it says that you have a promise inside you, and a faithfulness that you’re holding to that’s beyond this present sense of besiegement…

Lately I have felt somewhat besieged by the demands of my gentleman callers. Last week a man about whom I felt decidedly ambivalent (at best!) decided he wanted to see me again — right away! (Not free tomorrow? What about this weekend?! Soon! Soon!)

I could already feel my old habits kicking in on the first date, when confronted with his educated, urbane naysaying — the placating nodding, the disingenuous smile, the beginnings of invisibility. I wasn’t comfortable being myself. I was making an effort to identify with him and to please. The things women learn tacitly from our mothers and from cultural messages that relate the expectations for our gender (as wives and mothers): Take care of everyone! Don’t hurt anybody’s feelings! Don’t be disagreeable! (Even the most ostensibly “liberated” women I’ve met occasionally find themselves slipping into passive aggression rather than face a conflict head-on.)

After a few attempts to direct the flow, I let my date dominate the conversation, which, while certainly intelligent and even interesting, was not particularly warm or personal. I found myself glancing at my watch.

Of course he liked me; I wasn’t even there. I was a mirror. As I have been so often in the past. This is not what I’d call being “faithful” to the “promises” I’ve made to myself. This feels like a leap backwards, visiting unhappier days…and I have no desire to return to those days.

A “no” to this suitor may be a “yes” to me.

**

Words cannot express, however, the love and gratitude I feel toward David Whyte. I wouldn’t mind losing myself in his expansive and generous worldview, but he wouldn’t want me to walk any path other than my own. And for that I say: Can we clone him, please? He is precisely the sort of man I would love to meet.

I did actually meet him, once, at a signing at a local bookstore. He was as gracious, approachable, and good-humored as he seems on tape, a striking Anglo-Irishman with what they call distinguished graying at the temples of his thick shock of dark hair. With his look and his presence, he could easily have had a career as an actor. He is in an apparently happy second marriage now, and has two children, including a son who recently graduated college. But surely he can’t be the only man alive who perceives the grandeur in everyday objects and listens respectfully to silence? Who has such a finely tuned sense of the numinous he can elicit an almost religious awe in atheists like my former monk friend with a single well-spoken observation?

I’ve spent time with plenty of self-titled (why would one want a label anyway?) nihilists and pessimists and positivists and scientific materialists and existentialists and Marxists and hedonists and anarchists and academic Buddhists and all form of hyperintellectual wank-ists. I just can’t take the fluorescent-lit mental masturbation anymore, which turns arid and sore without the lush swampy wetness of feeling, intuition, and mystery — those “dark,” “irrational,” and yes, even “feminine” elements that resist pigeonholing, analysis, and compartmentalization. “Not everything that counts can be counted,” said Gandhi. A bumper sticker sound byte, but nonetheless astute.

I want a poet, damn it. At least one in spirit. Not a furious slammer-jammer or a conventional sentimentalist who pens syrupy greeting card verse, but someone who will get the things about me I need to get gotten. Who won’t attempt to make me feel crazy, or wrong, or as if I should just kill myself now. Who will help remind me of beauty, and of why human experience is unbelievably rich, instead of trying to make me forget it (again) now that I know it. Someone who doesn’t take every bloody fucking miracle of existence for granted just because the religious fundamentalists are out of their minds. It’s not an either-or proposition, for Christ’s sake.

**

When I got an email from my would-be beau after our second date, interpreting my own experience for me in condescending terms — that my hesitation to see him again was not because I didn’t think he was a good fit (I didn’t), or because I wasn’t sexually attracted to him (I wasn’t), but because I was “afraid” — that was the dealbreaker.

For a moment I flashed back to the various passages in Fear of Flying, which I had read again recently, in which Isadora Wing obediently accepts the arrogant armchair psychoanalysis practiced upon her by her cool-headed Asian husband and her potty-mouthed British lover. Erica Jong expertly captures how even the smartest, most educated women will still go on allowing the males in their lives to be the final authorities and to infantilize them (with an indulgent smile and a metaphorical pat on the head), as if Daddy still knows best.

Another story David Whyte tells is the old myth of an early tribe in Ireland, a peaceable lot, lovers of beauty, whose attitude toward strangers is hospitable rather than hostile. These gentle souls are confronted by a very martial group of new immigrants on a hillside. The latter group charges the former with their weapons raised, and the peaceable natives “turn sideways into the light and disappear.” David describes them as “refusing to have that kind of conversation.” They will not engage under the terms set by the aggressors. He warns us against falling into our habitual patterns of engagement and contention, the same old tired arguments we’ve had a hundred times. And I know as he speaks that I don’t want that.

One of the nicest things about being with Sam (who is twenty years younger than I am) was that he showed me implicit respect (respect for his elders?) without my having to fight, negotiate, or otherwise struggle for it. He didn’t seem interested in exerting or exhibiting power over me in any way. That was refreshing — and healing. It showed me that not all my relationships with men have to be about who wins. Just being with Sam felt like winning.

I want more of that. I want a peer and a co-explorer, not another father. Not another competitor seeking weaknesses to exploit. Sonny was, oddly enough, a movement in the right direction, when I think about things from this angle: his open-ended curiosity outweighed his need to label everything, including me. He was definitely more like a peer, at times something like a fellow traveler, not a self-appointed authority figure or scold. (Like what my brother used to be, before he bought his acre of land, became a father himself, and stiffened into rigid fundamentalism.) Sonny loves yoga, Eastern spirituality, women…and David Whyte.

So even while I was making not quite the best choices for myself, I was starting to make better ones. Progress. And then Sam. In this light, it’s hard to be pessimistic.

**

David also mentions that the root of the word “desire” is the Latin de sider, “of the stars,” suggesting that to have a desire is to hold one’s “star” inside oneself…to follow a sort of true North of the soul.

What kind of “star” was my irresistible, persistent desire for Ted? I never had it under control, even a year ago, when I felt pangs of jealousy about his fondness for young women and resolved not to surrender to my nascent feelings. A lot of good that did. Lately I fancy I see his face everywhere — on strangers in the street, in newspaper photos, on extras in movies. As if everything and everyone were conspiring to make me think about him. They say we see what we look for.

Now he may be gone. I may be delivered, belatedly. I’ll miss him, even though he was blocking the entrance for anyone else. I doubt he’ll contact me, either by phone or online. Part of me wishes he would. A large part, actually.

But what kind of “conversation” were we having, really? On the surface, a good one, an affable one between peers who liked and respected each other. He appreciated literature and Eastern thought and had an attitude of curiosity toward the larger world. Beneath that sunny veneer, however, existed the all too familiar narrative of the carrot and the stick — of one person subtly lording it over the other, hinting at rewards never to come. I said yes to being toyed with, alternately the object of intense flirting and casual ignoring.

Is it any wonder that the only way to take back my power was to ignore him right back?

Maybe that was my way of turning sideways into the light.

Wherever you may hail from, I thank you for joining me on my bumpy journey, and for your (overwhelmingly positive) feedback, both on-site and via email. Who knew that someone besides myself would want to gaze at my navel?

**

This month marks another anniversary as well: three years ago this month I fell madly in love.

I’ll bet you regulars think you know where I’m going with this, and you’re wrong. Yes, it was March 2006 when I took a fateful tumble for a certain someone…but at the same time I was discovering an incomparable young Irish singing/songwriting phenomenon known as Damien Rice.

Only days ago did I return to my beloved after a long absence; I had put away most of my more evocative music about a year ago, in an attempt to banish unnecessary sadness from my life for the purposes of enlightenment. But hearing his good friend from The Frames, Glen Hansard, delivering similarly goosebump-inducing lyrics with equal passion in the movie Once, put him at the forefront of my mind again. I started cruising YouTube for videos of Glen one day, and wound up unearthing this devastating live rendition by Damien of the 9 album song Elephant.

It felt like coming home.

**

Damien delivers a quiver that only the best poets can; he’s like a street Heaney meets Jeff Buckley, strumming the battered guitar he inherited from Nick Drake. His classic, slightly nasal Irish tenor can go from a hearty blast out of the chest to the hoarsest whisper in the space of a second; his anguished falsetto can elicit tears faster than a drunken pub sing-along of Danny Boy. You long to hear him pronounce words like Connemara or Ballyknockan with that lush Irish brogue. But it’s not just his amazing voice, it’s everything: his sense of the harmonics of emotion, the vibrations of naked yearning expressed through chord and melody, the intelligent, melancholy, confrontational poetry of his lyrics. He can howl “horny” or “fuck you” and make the words sound sublime. He reminds me of why I wanted to write, why anyone makes art in the first place.

My faithful reader in Germany accuses me of being too stubbornly stuck on one man, but I will say this: if Mr. Rice showed up on my lawn tomorrow, yelling my name like Stanley Kowalski, I’d be down there in a heartbeat.

The YouTube comments by hetero women about this comely if elfin powerhouse of a man are of course predictable, but I love to read what some of the straight men say: “I think I just went gay for a minute,” jokes one, while another gushes “I am a man and very hetero, and a guitar player myself. But seriously, if I could marry this man, I would, I would turn gay lol (sic) it doesn’t matter life would be complete being around Damien all day anyway.” The comment that makes me laugh out loud reads “I would hump him, he’s so powerful, I’m not gay but seriously, let the dry humping commence.” They don’t know what to do with another dude whose songs arouse shivers so profound and visceral they don’t know whether to cry or to come.

Some artists can cross all boundaries, and touch the raw, pulsating core of a human being. It’s an extraordinary gift.

**

Damien’s first major-release album O was my soundtrack to that spring and summer, and will forever be linked with the events of those warm, heady months. Delicate, its first track, unfailingly evokes for me the image of shoots pushing up through damp ground in early-morning sunlight, while The Blower’s Daughter will always send me back to a beautiful wood-floored studio glowing red in the late afternoon, watching Sonny hold a Warrior pose like a yogic Michelangelo. I can’t take my eyes off of you. (The first dozen or so times I listened to that song, I could not stop crying — I had never heard such a pure and perfect keen of longing.) Cold Water is quiet desolation tinged with faith, an appeal to both God and Other in the face of impossibility, hope against hope (which would turn out, at least momentarily, not to be in vain). I could go on, but suffice it to say that every song on that album is exquisite, and personally meaningful to me.

The only comparable period and soundtrack in my life that I can think of is probably my freshman year of college, falling in love with León accompanied by the heretofore undiscovered magic of Cat Stevens. Appropriately, his music represented youth itself, unbroken idealism charging heedlessly forward. I can’t keep it in, I gotta let it out. Two fine people should love each other.

Damien’s magic, twenty years later, lay in the pathos of broken and wiser experience reaching out to take one more risk, one more time. Love taught me to lie…it’s not hard to fall, when you float like a cannonball. I’m not a miracle and you’re not a saint.

His unflinching, sometimes brutal honesty is part of what makes his songs so compelling and beautiful. They shimmer with ragged authenticity.

**

Whether or not my absentee friend is a miracle, I’m not a saint, and I’ve failed at Damien-grade honesty. I like the image of an iceberg one of my commenters used: all you know about things is the visible tip I’ve shared. There’s a whole lot more underwater, and it doesn’t all make me look like some sterling Victorian heroine tragically seduced by the obligatory dashing cad. (Although I do appreciate your chivalrous impulses.)

No, it actually felt good, a couple of posts ago, to own my own ambivalence, and to point out the tinted filter created by my own insecurities. The things I’ve obsessed about endlessly don’t necessarily have a firm base in reality, other than what happened one summer, and what I, of all people, have no business judging. So don’t go taking all my fears as facts. I feel like I have to come clean about my own barely explicable caprice.

Briefly: only days after a blessed encounter with my beautiful friend, during the first flush of summer, I departed for a preplanned trip to Italy. I had promised to keep him and a small group of close friends abreast of my activities abroad with a weekly email travel diary.

Well, by the second week, my readers were being treated to tales of an attractive young Englishman I’d met in the lakes region. Overnight, I became desperately and fecklessly infatuated with the bloke: he was funny, caustic, and just the sort of ridiculing intellectual who makes me strive so hard to get Daddy’s approval. (He even dated a graduate of my college.) I made no secret of my ardor to anyone on my list, blathering on and on about it endlessly, expecting it to be my grand Foreign Affair. (It wasn’t.)

So, basically, after finally getting close to a gorgeous man with a warm heart and an emotional vocabulary, whom I had summoned out of the ether and then proceeded to coax all spring long, I went right back to chasing my father — publicly — albeit on a different continent.

Who’s the asshole now?

The strange thing was that the whole time I maintained the unshakable, if “irrational,” conviction that our connection was such that it could survive all circumstances and mutations of form…as if he really were, in some spiritual sense, family. I had said as much before, and he may have believed it: he was taken aback and sorry when I reacted violently (and hypocritically) to his own summer misadventures. Here in the States, he had been busy making like Wilt Chamberlain, reliving earlier, wilder days. (A counselor friend of mine observed very counselor-esquely that it seemed as if after touching on intimacy, we both reverted to older, more pathological ways of being.)

Anyway, before you go judging my erstwhile buddy as just another faithless man-slut, bear in mind who else flaked out completely. Yes, women adore the man, and he adores them, but he did commit himself to his last significant other once they got serious. I can’t point to something similarly redeeming in my own recent history.

**

But speaking of irrational convictions…

Last week I started to seriously entertain (for the umpteenth time) every voice, both external and internalized, urging me to get reasonable, to trust outside judges and the dictates of five-sense empiricism, and accept that I’m just another daft female making up all kinds of crazy shit about the way things are. Don’t I know I’ll never be anything but a miserable failure until I train myself to believe only hard facts, and trust other people’s authority and word over my “impressions?”

Like a child I lay on the bed and sobbed from my diaphragm, feeling chills of pain from this negation vibrating through the marrow of my bones, threatening to shatter me. It was as if my brain were trying to kill my entire being from the inside. This was, as Carol Gilligan has said (as did I, in Sing, Goddess), about so much more than one circumscribed situation. This was about my ability to trust myself, or not, to be able to navigate through the world with the “feminine,” intuitive, instinctual, intangible capacities and tools I have always used, and to be able to say that I know what I know, regardless of what the official line is. It’s a struggle I’ve revisited again and again for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes I’ve felt like Angelina Jolie in Changeling, institutionalized and pumped full of dope for saying “That is not my son.”

But it really wasn’t her son.

**

Later, stumbling to the computer, tear-stained and exhausted from trying to vivisect still-living parts of myself, I started searching for music on YouTube by Glen Hansard. I remembered how Falling Slowly and other numbers from the film made me weep gently with the recognition, the reassurance that someone else embraced unsayable emotional realities and could produce almost palpable variations in the rarefied air around a song. I was already getting somewhat soothed by Glen’s music when I saw Damien in the ‘related videos’ column, and clicked on him instead.

Immediately I was flooded with forgotten gratitude for his passion, his acuity, his humming incandescent connection to unseen worlds. I felt myself growing physically stronger, as if the music were transfusing me. Even the most woeful complexities of emotions he brought forth I welcomed like old, formerly estranged friends. Some emboldened voice within me asserted this is who you are. This is where you belong. You don’t have to force yourself to be different…fuck that!!!

It’s something I love in Rilke, too, and numerous other poets: the masterful evocation of what the tools of ordinary perception and reason invariably miss. Somewhere between a trembling note and an original turn of phrase like stones taught me to cry (which makes no logical sense) a delicate universe blooms, populated by whispering existences seen best from the corner of the eye or felt with a sixth sense. As if a portal had suddenly opened up, between the prosaic everyday world that we assume is the only real one and a hidden dimension of limitless beauty that reminds us of how ephemeral our lives truly are.

If that makes no sense, it’s because I’m trying to use words to describe something for which words are almost entirely inadequate. It’s Laurie Anderson’s famous line about trying to dance about architecture.

**

I honed my critical mind to defend myself at the dinner table, but I never got out of fifty books of philosophy what I get out of five lines of Wordsworth. I’m a poet by nature, which makes me by default a madwoman. We’re not journalists; we rely on the messages we get from unconfirmed sources, rumors, the movement of birds. Our bones ache when it’s going to rain. We watch expressions cross faces, the tilt of a head or the placement of an arm, that say the opposite of the words being spoken. We see desire flash in his eyes, and doubt cloud hers. We contemplate the stillness of trees, and listen to see if they speak. There is always more here than meets the eye.

What I really need is what makes me bleed, sings Damien on the haunting track Volcano. It was by pain, after all, that he was driven and enabled to produce works of such deep resonance. If we were all suddenly filled with the nirvanic bliss of oneness, I wonder, would there be any more art, any more reason to confront and grapple with our relationship to the world and other people? Probably not. But what the best artists accomplish through their struggle, ironically enough, is an experience of union for their audience — who get to see or feel or know what the artist sees or feels or knows. In doing so, they no longer feel so separate.

“You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver in Wild Geese. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Defiant words, choosing vulnerable, fallible humanness over the pursuit of perfection. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

I will do just that, by ending with a poem I wrote during a comparable time two years ago when I despaired of everything I thought I knew and everything I knew I wanted. (Another irony: in order to write about my loss of faith in imagination and other vital intangibles, I had to access my imagination and other vital intangibles.)

**

Tie a Knot and Hold On

No place in the world you belong,
and it doesn’t want your gifts,

those labors you laid
at the feet of your wanting
with a pure heart,
your blood offerings.

The sun is too bright
and beauty is nowhere beneath it,

only the tired faces of people
you wouldn’t want to be,
much as you don’t want to be
yourself.

None quicken the heart
or bring the surfaces alive
with gladness.

There is a kind of exhaustion
born of waiting too long
for a star that appears for an hour,

when the darkness is endless
and hard to love.

In this barren landscape,
this exile, beyond faith,
beyond hope,

sit still by the swings
and watch children at play.

Remember that time
before disappointments
and burdens
arrested your skyward arc

and take heart from those
who have not yet lost
that delight, in imagined

heroics, their kingdoms
of sand.

If he hadn’t died almost fifty years ago in a plane crash regarded as suspect by investigators as notable as bishop Desmond Tutu, and had lived to see the new millennium, Dag Hammarskjöld would be 103 years old today.

Best known as a cold-war era U.N. Secretary-General with a Carter-esque gift for diplomacy (he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously), Hammarskjöld kept a journal that was published after his death and has since become a minor classic of Christian mysticism. Poet and translator W.H. Auden said of the book, Markings,

The overall impression which the book makes (is) the conviction when one has finished it that one has had the privilege of being in contact with a good, great, and lovable man.

*

I picked up the book more than ten years ago, when I was working in an independent bookstore as the buyer for the psychology and religion sections. Hammarskjöld’s style immediately struck me as poetic, aphoristic, and epigrammatic, much like Nietzsche’s – but his content differs wildly from the latter author’s, at least in its conclusions. A reader can find that same sense of special-ness, that same narrator’s perspective of being set apart from others (by reason of superior sensitivity or intelligence), but Hammarskjöld seeks to diminish rather than cultivate his considerable ego. I can’t imagine Nietzsche writing the following:

Your ego-love doesn’t bloom unless it is sheltered. The rules are simple: don’t commit yourself to anyone and, therefore, don’t allow anyone to come close to you. Simple — and fateful. Its efforts to shelter its love create a ring of cold around the Ego which slowly eats its way inwards toward your core.

And here, in a dark moment of unqualified misanthropy that reads more like Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, he is thoroughly candid and doesn’t flatter himself:

At any rate, your contempt for your fellow human beings does not prevent you, with a well-guarded self-respect, from trying to win their respect.

But it is probably reflections like these (which mirror the essence of other spiritual traditions like Buddhism) that earned him the appellation of mystic:

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is — is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.

On being present:

The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them.

And, on one of my favorite themes lately, nonresistance:

What must come to pass, should come to pass. Within the limits of that must, therefore, you are invulnerable.

*

It’s worth mentioning that, thanks to his journal, we now know that Hammarskjöld also composed lyrical, imagistic modern poetry that translates beautifully from Swedish.

The breaking wave
And the muscle as it contracts
Obey the same law.

An austere line
Gathers the body’s play of strength
In a bold balance.

Shall my soul meet
This curve, as a bend in the road
On her way to form?

(His undergraduate degree had been a humanities degree, specializing in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Herman Hesse.)

*

Little is known about the details of Hammarskjöld’s personal life. He never married, or even publicly courted anyone, and the openly gay Auden always believed him to be a closet case. But there is no evidence to either support or refute this. What can clearly be divined from his writings is that his heart’s desires were, for some reason, decisively thwarted. As with our friend Kierkegaard, however, this particular form of suffering seemed to contribute greatly to his spiritual development and lead him to some of his more profound insights.

“Perhaps a great love is never returned,” he writes. “Had it been given warmth and shelter by its counterpart in the Other, perhaps it would have been hindered from ever growing to maturity.” Instead of getting caught up in the cycles of need, demand, and preoccupation with physical and psychological gratifications that can dominate even the best of relationships, Hammarskjöld arrives at observations like this:

Our incurable instinct to acquire — to assimilate in the crudest sense of the word — provides the medium for much of our aesthetic experience. Like the mountain troll who wants to eat the princess over and over again — only over again to have the experience of being just a mountain troll. We pick the flower. We press body against body — bringing to nought that human beauty which is only physical in that the surfaces of the body are animated by a spirit inaccessable to human touch.

Hammarskjöld understands the underlying hunger — that the desire to possess derives from a sense of spiritual incompleteness. He also comes to a realization that could quite easily have been written by Osho or Krishnamurti or even Eckhart Tolle:

When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When love has matured and, through a dissolution of self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.

*

Dag nabbed it, all right. I’d like to think that in that moment when his small aircraft smashed into a Congolese jungle, he dissolved into a final radiance, and became one with everything he longed for.

As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high light of the morning.

I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no — but refreshed, rested — while waiting.

Happy Birthday to a beautiful soul, and one of my great and beloved teachers.