In defense of longing

A small note before today’s repost.

While taking a month-long pause from her own newsletter, The Untangling, my friend Tiffany Chu spent a few weeks spotlighting writers whose work has moved her. I was honored to find my essay In Defense of Longing among them.

I first encountered Tiffany through her luminous, searching stories and essays long before we met in person. Later, at <Mary L. Tabor>’s book launch in Los Angeles, she drove up from San Diego and we finally shared the kind of hug that makes you believe in past lives. We’ve certainly crossed paths before, probably ones navigated by dragon and wing.

Tiffany writes with extraordinary tenderness about grief, belonging, memory, and how to remain human in a world that asks us to harden. I recently finished reading her forthcoming collection, The Constellation of Forgotten Things, created alongside the writings of her late son, Renley N. Chu, and found myself moved by the living conversation at its heart. Through these stories, Tiffany and Renley remain in conversation, much like I crafted through imaginary letters & poetry with my biological father, Charlie. Her own storytelling moves alongside Renley's, creating a collection that feels part memorial, part living exchange—a body of work that continues to travel beyond death's interruption to find new homes in the hearts of readers.

I’m looking forward to welcoming Tiffany onto the Unfixed podcast when her book launches later this fall. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a thoughtful companion in your weekly reads, I highly recommend her newsletter.

And now, a revisitation of longing. Because this one has us in its sweaty embrace until end.

Love Dogs 
One night a man was crying,
“Allah, Allah!”
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer for that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage,
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing you express
is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.
- Rumi

Before I could speak, I strummed empty air.

Fingers fanned, hands like petals opened to honeybee hum. Mom said it was angelic, a celestial harp in my reach. But I’m not so sure. Maybe it was simpler than that.

Years later, I’d learn that when I was five and a half months old, I was left with a babysitter who drank herself into a stupor. My parents came home to find the front door open, the sitter half-dressed on the couch, and me, shivering in a diaper, a bruise blooming on my cheek. I wasn’t crying when they found me, I had already curled away from reaching, from wanting. The terror of unrequited ache was too much for my unformed nervous system.

But my body didn’t forget. I wonder now if those early, outstretched fingers were reaching for something lost, or trying to knit me back to source. Each gesticulation a re-gestation of longing. I want. I want. I want. I want the warmth of my own wanting, returned, revitalized, restored. Less for memory, more for re-membering. For the stitching together of what was once whole: want with body, need with response, ache with touch.

I pause now, mid-sentence, and do it again, letting my fingers stretch into the invisible. Plucking space, grabbing air, ten digits calling life to come close. And I feel it, the gesture begins in my hands, then runs deeper, threading through sinew and bone, and then beyond, all the way back to star-dusted source. That first breath, that first scream, the moment one rends into many, the moment life begins in rupture. Longing is the echo of that rupture.

When I was in my early twenties, I lived for a time on the fairy-laced landscape of Findhorn, Northern Scotland, trading garden work for bed and bread. I spent quiet mornings in meditation with founder Eileen Caddy, then slipped behind a studio door where I could dance the rigidity of fifteen years of ballet into unstudied abandon. I was alone most of that year-long journey through Europe, and longing became my closest companion. Longing for purpose, for meaning, for magic. Longing for my life, and my buried grief, to finally make sense. But the things I chased to fulfill that longing never left me full, or filled.

So I danced longing instead, a shape that has no counterpart, emptiness that needs no opposite. We’ve been taught to treat longing like a means to an end. A vacancy to fill. But what if longing isn’t actually something missing but the manifestation of something ancient? What if longing is how love breathes, its pressure valve, the body’s way of staying in conversation with the cosmos? I danced myself concave, a vessel from some distant time, and let the void become my vow. My fingers, my arms, opened again as blossom, as tributary, as low tide. I stopped trying to fill the ache and let the ache sing. And while it may’ve looked like I was reaching for something, I was reaching with something. A part of me that remembered the before. Before memory, before story. A cosmic spark that splits into leaf and limb carries within it the seed of our return. Could longing, then, also be our re-membering?

Rumi writes: “This longing you express is the return message.”

But even now decades later, the sharp, hollowed ache arrives uninvited. Around my period, the emptiness turns me inside out, like the moon inverted by night sky every month. I walk this cyclical vacancy outside, my old impulse to fill returning. Maybe spring’s abundance will come rushing in. Maybe today I will discover the one thing that, at last, balloons me into lasting fullness. The lilacs haven’t yet bloomed, and the air smells like green hesitating toward perfume. A chorus of birds sings, their voices just shy of piercing the veil. Earth, her mouth wide open, licks the sun with infinite, insatiable tongue.

The longing is too large for one object. It’s ambient. Atmospheric. It asks not for this or that, but for everything. There is no ridding the world of this feeling, so I join it.

Lie down in the bowl of a dry lakebed with me, faces lifted, arms and legs wide, remembering the dream of rain as we become the crystalline salt aching and arcing with thirst. Feel how our shape calls with sharp knowing of other, something ineffable but true. Feel its promise and how we yearn toward it. And then we watch: the sky swells, pressing her darkness into our bodies, one drop at a time, then all at once. We soften. We receive. But just as our longing subsides, another grows beneath. Longing unfulfilled yet transmuted. Once electrons seeking balance, now sprouts breaking through soil, the urgent push of cellulose and sinew reaching toward light. Longing waves cerulean tenderness up up up until she too is plucked with another’s appetite, a daisy-chain of mouths with dreams and young fingers clawing the air. We strum a dissonance that never, truly, resolves.

Author Sophie Strand writes in her transcendent memoir The Body Is a Doorway: “I have not been inside a love story. I have been a love story: my very body a clamorous, complicated interplay of beings disagreeing, singing, swooning, and melting together. As a year, then two years, passed during which I did not take human lovers, I realized that I was not really “single.” I was deeply plural: my whole life was erotic, flush with sensual, multispecies love.”

Most feel a longing to fill, but Sophie’s is a longing to host. Longing that rushes through cells and stars, as it rides the looping continuum of separation and union, a signature of entanglement, like quantum particles still responding to one another across time and space. Longing is the murmur of microbiomes remembering each other, the skin’s way of calling to pollen, to wind, to touch, the way Earth pulls on Moon in orbital foreplay.

I shared the sitter story with my brilliant friend and writer Veronika Bond during a recent interview. We were exploring her Synchronosophical approach to trauma when she paused and said, “It’s not the story that matters, it’s how the longing lives in you now.” And she was right.

It lives in my daily cat grabbiness, in my gutted sadness, in the way my womb aches for the moon, the way I curl around a pillow, in the feral impulse to love-bite Dave’s shoulder just to feel that ache in my jaw meet something real. They call it “cuteness aggression,” and I’ll admit, cute gets me going. But isn’t biting, ingestion, also one of our most primal, and perhaps most sagacious, ways of returning to One? If trauma is jilted longing, then healing is the return to wanting. To let it praise and stretch like sky and rain unto itself. Longing as midwife to the possible, even the unimaginable. Humming, howling, singing without consonance and crashing into birdsong. It is both the love dog howling into the void and the void, echoing back. If Earth had fingers, she would strum the sky. If gravity had voice, it would moan like a dog for its master.

Even extinction remembers the ache. In 1987, a lone Kaua‘i ʻŌʻō bird was recorded singing the final song of its species. A duet, missing its partner’s reply. Between each phrase, he left space for an answer that would never come, and still, he sang. His song became a haunting echo of life’s insistence to reach, even when no reply comes.

Give your life to be one of them, Rumi says—
the Kaua‘i ʻŌʻō
a love dog
one of the ones who know: when we can be with our longing, we finally be-long.

Because without longing, nothing would begin. Or begin again. My fanning fingers join the howl and strum life anew. The first spark, the one that blew the universe apart was a longing. And now, millennia later, we carry the torch. Our very ache the hallowed hollowing of endless becoming.

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