Step away from that pancake!

"All human creativity issues from the urgency of longing...The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life."
-- John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes

Reading these thoughts this morning, in the context of yesterday's readings and discoveries, I see that all that is great and good and terrible in us humans seems to stem from our efforts to bridge the distance between what is and what could be; and that all the times we hunger -- whether for food, or "stuff", or love, or belonging -- arise out of that longing, which, O' Donohue says, comes from this: that "The one who dreamed the universe loved circles and created everything with such beautiful incompletion that we need others to complete the circles of identity, belonging, and creativity."

These thoughts came clear to me in my morning's meditation (however muddy they may seem in the re-telling of them), and I arose from my chair eager to write them down. But that, too, is a hunger, and so I created space around it by choosing to follow my normal routine and complete today's entry in the Gospel of Thomas first. And there I found the poem I had written -- at least a year ago, if not more -- for today's Logion:

I understand:
there are things you want,
things you need,
even some things you crave:
this life cannot be easy.

Those wants,
those needs,
those cravings --
bring them all to me:
let me demonstrate
how I can fill your emptiness
with blessings beyond imagining.

Every step away from riches
is one step closer to Heaven.

Don't you just love the synchronicity of this?

And, oh-by-the-way, yesterday's practice of stopping to breathe was good: not enough, but good. I missed the serenity of my meditation practice, but I want to do both. So today I will try to keep that up, but I will also attempt to notice, be conscious, of the hungers I feel over the course of the day, and see if I can allow them to remind me of my deeper hunger -- the one that fuels my creativity; the one that feeds my soul.

Pancakes alone are not enough!

Addendum:
After writing this, I left to go in for my weekly coffee date, and this was the song I heard, waiting at the one stoplight between here and there:

The hills are full of secrets
Owls watch by night
Down in town the bars are full
And the drunks are picking fights
These are things I know
But the facts are filtered through
All the ways I want you

2:19 freight train
Moaning somewhere near
I see you in the distance
But I can't get there from here
Hard to believe it's happening
But my whole world's shrunken to
All the ways I want you

Stars look down and laugh at me
I ought to take a bow
Don't have to tell them life's hard sometimes
There's one falling now
Nobody's here beside me
I can talk about it to
All the ways I want you.

-- Bruce Cockburn, All the Ways I Want You
(to listen to a Jimmy Buffet version, click here.)

I don't know. It was beautiful. And in its own way, totally relevant. But maybe that's just me.