What have you longed for with the intensity of homesickness? Of heart-sickness?

Of both?

Like a child who yearns for home but is at sleep-away camp for the very first time.

Like a fleeing refugee, surrounded by the unfamiliar, by chaos, by sounds and smells of some-place-else.

When have you longed for a world made new in the birth of every single babe, or by the scattered shining shards of the cosmos brought back into Holy Unity?

Let it be now.

Longing is uncomfortable, painful, even anguish-filled. So much so, we find ourselves mindlessly doing all that we can to avoid the feelings, the memories of scarcity, the hurt of not-enough, the wounds of betrayal.

May That-Which-Infuses-All-Life — called by some, “God,” by others Spirit of Life, Sacred Mother Earth, Ultimate Reality – remind us that longing, with all its waiting and unrealized nature, is better than the alternative: complacency, moral slumber, emotional fog, addiction to numbness, death.

May our dearest companions on this journey be of lasting nature, deep compassion, and good humor.

May each of us, and this whole wide planet, be blessed with the courage necessary to live into our deepest longings.

And may these longings lead us to be seekers of truth, keepers of faith, people of mercy, and agents of change.