“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.  I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.”

So starts Oriah’s poem that opens her book.

A friend sent this book to me, having sent me quotes from it while Dan and I were in the Ukraine for the adoption.  I’m going to share some of my favorite parts.

“When I imagine myself as an old woman at the end of my life and ask myself how I will evaluate my time here, there is only one question that concerns me: Did I love well?  There are a thousand ways to love other people and the world–with our touch, our words, our silences, our work, our presence.  I want to love well.  This is my hunger.”

“This is what I ache for: intimacy with myself, others, and the world, intimacy that touches the sacred in all that is life.  This ache, this longing is the thread that guides me back through the labyrinth of compromises I have made, back to my soul’s desires.  And sometimes I am afraid of my desires–afraid of what they will ask of me, what vision of myself or the world they will offer that may demand sacrifice of my carefully cultivated way of seeing.  If we are never consumed by the transforming fire of our desires, we risk falling in love with the sweet ache of longing, the daydream of “what if…” or “some day…”

“There is a tension in living fully, what often feels like an opposition between our longing for the solitude where we can find our own company and the desire to be fully and intimately with the world.  When we learn to live with both the desire for separation and the longing for union, we find that they are simply two ways of knowing the same ache; we all just want to go home.”

All these ring true for me.  I long to be known and to know others, and in a crazy world, this is harder and harder to find.  Recently, I’ve been the recipient of kind and thoughtful gifts from four of my friends–one of whom I’ve never met face-t0-face.  These gifts have lovingly been selected and chosen for me, and they’ve touched my heart in ways I haven’t felt before–at least by girlfriends.  It’s being known, being loved.

During my first quarter at UCLA, I was overwhelmed in my mathematics classes, swarmed by more fellow students than I could ever imagine, unsure of how I was going to pay for everything, and unknown (throughout the semester) by any of my professors.  It was an isolating experience.  I was the oldest of seven kids, so the fact that I was going through this terribly lonely time was the least of my family’s concerns.  Several days before Halloween, I received a small box of salt water taffy from one of my close friends who lived miles away.  I sat there and stared.  How could she have known I needed this–this utterly small thing? I wept.  Someone had remembered me.

So, I just wanted to publicly say that these tiny things matter.  They are the backbone of a true friendship.  And I want to thank these friends from the bottom of my heart.  You have given the greatest gift of all–the gift of love.

[Post image: 8 Hands by eastop on stock.xchng]