Yearning

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Before I died, became too old or consumed with everyday minutiae, I wanted to visit the planet’s most beautiful and wondrous places. And its most sacred. Of course I wanted to taste other foods, hear other languages, dive into other cultures, but what I really craved was connection with a capital C. I wanted to experience what the Chinese call Tao, the Greeks call Logos, the Hindus call Jñāna, the Buddhists call Dharma. What the Christians call Spirit. Before setting out on my own personal life voyage, I thought, let me first understand the greater voyage of humankind. Let me explore the grandest temples and churches and shrines, the holiest rivers and mountaintops. Let me feel the presence of… God? Yes, I told myself, yes. For want of a better word, God. But first, I’d need my father’s approval. More, I’d need his cash. I’d already mentioned making a big trip, the previous year, and my father seemed open to it. But surely he’d forgotten. And surely I was pushing it, adding to the original proposal this Crazy Idea, this outrageous side trip—to Japan? To launch a company? Talk about boondoggles. Surely he’d see this as a bridge too far. And a bridge too darned expensive. I had some savings from the Army, and from various part-time jobs over the last several summers. On top of which, I planned to sell my car, a cherry black 1960 MG with racing tires and a twin cam. (The same car Elvis drove in Blue Hawaii .) All of which amounted to fifteen hundred dollars, leaving me a grand short, I now told my father. He nodded, uh-huh, mm-hmm, and flicked his eyes from the TV to me, and back again, while I laid it all out. Remember how we talked, Dad? How I said I want to see the World? The Himalayas? The pyramids? The Dead Sea, Dad? The Dead Sea ? Well, haha, I’m also thinking of stopping off in Japan, Dad. Remember my Crazy Idea? Japanese running shoes? Right? It could be huge, Dad. Huge. I was laying it on thick, putting on the hard sell, extra hard, because I always hated selling, and because this particular sell had zero chance. My father had just forked out hundreds of dollars to the University of Oregon, thousands more to Stanford. He was the publisher of the Oregon Journal , a solid job that paid for all the basic comforts, including our spacious white house on Claybourne Street, in Portland’s quietest suburb, Eastmoreland. But the man wasn’t made of money. Also, this was 1962. The earth was bigger then. Though humans were beginning to orbit the planet in capsules, 90 percent of Americans still had never been on an airplane.

• From Educated (2018)

  It’s so loud, I’m sure my head has come off and he’s holding it. My body folds, I collapse. Everything is black but somehow spinning. When I open my eyes moments later, his hands are under my arms and he’s holding me upright. “Might be a while before you can stand,” he says. “But when you can, I need to do the other side.” I was too dizzy, too nauseous, for the effect to be immediate. But throughout the evening I observed small changes. I could look at the ceiling. I could cock my head to tease Richard. Seated on the couch, I could turn to smile at the person next to me. That person was Shawn, and I was looking at him but I wasn’t seeing him. I don’t know what I saw—what creature I conjured from that violent, compassionate act—but I think it was my father, or perhaps my father as I wished he were, some longed-for defender, some fanciful champion, one who wouldn’t fling me into a storm, and who, if I was hurt, would make me whole. [image "Chapter 11 Instinct" file=Image00013.jpg] When Grandpa-down-the-hill was a young man, there’d been herds of livestock spread across the mountain, and they were tended on horseback. Grandpa’s ranching horses were the stuff of legend. Seasoned as old leather, they moved their burly bodies delicately, as if guided by the rider’s thoughts. At least, that’s what I was told. I never saw them. As Grandpa got older he ranched less and farmed more, until one day he stopped farming. He had no need for horses, so he sold the ones that had value and set the rest loose. They multiplied, and by the time I was born there was a whole herd of wild horses on the mountain. Richard called them dog-food horses. Once a year, Luke, Richard and I would help Grandpa round up a dozen or so to take to the auction in town, where they’d be sold for slaughter. Some years Grandpa would look out over the small, frightened herd bound for the meat grinder, at the young stallions pacing, coming to terms with their first captivity, and a hunger would appear in his eyes. Then he’d point to one and say, “Don’t load that ’un. That ’un we’ll break.” But feral horses don’t yield easily, not even to a man like Grandpa. My brothers and I would spend days, even weeks, earning the horse’s trust, just so we could touch it. Then we would stroke its long face and gradually, over more weeks, work our hands around its wide neck and down its muscular body. After a month of this we’d bring out the saddle, and the horse would toss its head suddenly and with such violence that the halter would snap or the rope break. Once a large copper stallion busted the corral fence, smashed through it as if it weren’t there, and came out the other side bloody and bruised.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And the snow fell in white plumes. Like a million tiny diamonds it covered the cemetery in back of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And everyone, even Us, looked pink and real in the white light. And if it had snowed longer, it might have killed some of the cockroaches. For a few hours, this rotten city was purified. Someone even threw a snowball! The snow melted in quilted brown patches, it rained, there was slush. The sun came out with renewed cold fury. Monday. The Parade of Proteus, who can assume any shape, any form, will pass tonight in a flaming snake of torches. Whiterobed mummers, ghosts of ghosts.... And at midnight, Mardi Gras begins.... Negro children somersault along the street for Tips. Stray Dixieland bands become more numerous. Spasm bands sprout.... And this birthplace of Jazz is now shaking and rolling, twisting, to the new sounds of our ravenous time. Through the open doors of the welcoming nightclubs on Bourbon (aggressive hawkers like recruiting sergeants luring the tourists with unfulfilled promises), you hear the drum-dominated, subterranean sounds of take-it-off music from the vast neighborhood of sexless sex. In the cramped rooms, the smoke-choked apartments, the old, old houses, into the patios, the parties are impromptu and laughter reigns over the city like a reckless deity. And the afternoon has already aged into grayish yellow, the shadows are lengthening to pull down the night. And soon even that fading light wearies. Stars appear cautiously in the wings of dark. The gray darkness reaches insidiously soothingly for its anxious children. In the swelling cankerous crowds, men and women in the streets drink out of giant hurricane glasses from O’Malley’s bar, tilting the glasses to capture each drop, seemingly toasting the faint moon which has already appeared in her own sequined drag.... And the cops continue intrepidly, pointlessly, vengefully to scour the city, nailing the youngmen who look like vagrants—and who, as the cops stop to interrogate someone else, can dart into the crowded streets, escaping before their absence is discovered. Past the Cathedral, obliviously, swelling groups snakedance dizzily through the weird streets and alleys. And in the rushing night, the Cathedral—its nebulous spires trying more urgently to fade into Heaven—girds itself stonily for the masked revelers who will soon appear.... And gray, as if preparatory to mourning, donning the night’s dark shroud, it waits—frozen, austere, ashen—for its own redemptive day: Ash Wednesday. Near the French Market is an enormous chicken and rooster coop. Earlier, I had stood before the wire, watching in fascination as the roosters sliced frantically at the air, feathers like sparks of many-colored fire.... Suddenly, one jumped above the others, clawing directly before me, urgently at the wired cage. Remembering that now as if I were standing before that cage again, one thought thundered in my mind: I’ll go to the airport right now, I’ll get a plane, I’ll fly out of this city! But already, night has inundated New Orleans.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Girardin, who built the garden at Ermenonville where Jean-Jacques Ro u ssea u was buried, says at the end of a description of woods, river, and fi e lds : "C'est dan s de semblables situations que l'on eprouve toute la force de ce tte an alogie entre les charmes physiques et les impressions morales ... on v oudrait y rester toujours, parce que le coeur y sent toute la verite et l'energie de la nature" ("It is in such situations that one witnesses the ful] force of the a nalogy between physical beauty and moral impressions ... one would like t o re m ain there forever, becaus e the heart then feels all the truth and energy o f n a tu re"). 30 Thomas, one of the writers cited by Mornet, loved the "vastes f or et s ", becau se they "reposent et agrandissent l'ime"; while for Marquis de M ir a b e au, the beauties of nature demand a sublime soul "pour soutenir un c o m m e rc e intim e avec sa silencieuse majeste" ("vast forests" ... "rest and e l e v a te the soul"; "to sustain an intimate exchange with its s i lent majesty"). 31 Th e M ar quis de Lan g ] e , h owev er, is i n a quite different state after visiting the L a k e of Thun: " Le jour ou je vis p our la premiere fois ce beau lac faillit etre 2.98 · THE AFF IRMATION OF ORDINARY LIFE le dernier de mes jours: mon existence m,echappait; je me mourais de se n ti r, de jouir: je tombais dans Paneantissement,, ("The day when I first saw t his beautiful lake was almost my last: my existence was slipping from me; I w a s dying w ith feeling, with delight: l was falling into nothingness"). 32 The new wave of 'English, gardens wer e built with this relatio n in vie w. The aim was to awak en and nourish certain sentiments. The art of buil d i n g g ardens had a basic principle, according to the Prince de Ligne: "Cherch o n s a parler a Pame,, ("Let us ende a vour to speak to the soul,,}. And f o r Hirschfeld it w as : "Remuons fortement Pimagination et le sentiment ,, ("le t us stir up the imaginat ion and feelings").

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  They were magic words, arcane and lost. I wanted to master this world that no one knew, to be an expert in its perfect, secret language. You can buy it all on the internet now: jesses, hoods, bells, gloves, everything. But when I began falconry, most of us made our own equipment. We’d buy swivels from deep-sea-fishing shops, leashes from ships’ chandlers, beg offcuts from leather tanneries and shoe factories to make our own jesses and hoods. We adapted, we adopted, we usually didn’t improve. Certainly I didn’t. I spent countless hours waxing cotton thread, punching holes in my hands instead of leather in error , frowning, wiping blood away , trying again and again to cut and make and sew things that looked like the photographs in books, waiting for the glorious day when I might have a hawk of my own. I have a suspicion that all those hours making jesses and leashes weren’t just preparation games. In a scrapbook of my childhood drawings is a small pencil sketch of a kestrel sitting on a glove. The glove’s just an outline, and not a good one – I was six when I drew it. The hawk has a dark eye, a long tail, and a tiny fluffy spray of feathers under its hooked beak. It is a happy kestrel, though a ghostly one; like the glove, it is strangely transparent. But one part of it has been carefully worked: its legs and taloned toes, which are larger than they ought to be, float above the glove because I had no idea how to draw toes that gripped. All the scales and talons on all the toes are delineated with enormous care, and so are the jesses around the falcon’s legs. A wide black line that is the leash extends from them to a big black dot on the glove, a dot I’ve gone over again and again with the pencil until the paper is shined and depressed. It is an anchor point. Here , says the picture, is a kestrel on my hand. It is not going away. It cannot leave . It’s a sad picture. It reminds me of a paper by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, the one about a child obsessed with string; a boy who tied together chairs and tables, tied cushions to the fireplace even, worryingly, tied string around his sister’s neck. Winnicott saw this behaviour as a way of dealing with fears of abandonment by the boy’s mother , who’d suffered bouts of depression. For the boy, the string was a kind of wordless communication, a symbolic means of joining. It was a denial of separation. Holding tight .

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The day-book that records White’s long, lost battle with Gos is not simply about his hawk. Underneath it all is history, and sexuality, and childhood, and landscape, and mastery, and medievalism, and war, and teaching and learning and love. All those things were going to be in the book he was writing about the hawk. When the hawk was lost he abandoned the attempt. But not entirely, because the book, in a different form, was still being finished, and the hawk would not be lost for ever. At the beginning of The Sword in the Stone Sir Ector’s son Kay takes the Wart out hawking. He picks up Cully the goshawk from the castle mews – an unwise thing to do, for the hawk is deep in the moult and wildly out of condition. After a half-hearted sally at a rabbit the hawk takes stand on a high branch and ignores their calls. They follow it from tree to tree, whistling and luring, but the hawk is in no mood to return. Kay flies into a temper and storms home, but the Wart stays with the hawk, because he cannot bear it to be lost. He follows it into the deep wildwood, and there he is afraid. Reading The Sword in the Stone after reading The Goshawk is a deeply curious thing. You start to confuse which forest is which. One is the tangled wildwood of Arthur’s Britain, a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men. The other is the tangled forest around Stowe. It too is a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men, the place White hoped would give him the freedom to be who he was. Like the forest in Sir Orfeo, the forests of White’s imagination exist in two worlds at once, and it is into these strange, doubled woods that the lost hawk leads the Wart. In following it, the boy is drawn to his destiny, just as White had been drawn to his own by looking for Gos.

• From Educated (2018)

  and he’s holding it. My body folds, I collapse. Everything is black but somehow spinning. When I open my eyes moments later, his hands are under my arms and he’s holding me upright. “Might be a while before you can stand,” he says. “But when you can, I need to do the other side.” I was too dizzy, too nauseous, for the effect to be immediate. But throughout the evening I observed small changes. I could look at the ceiling. I could cock my head to tease Richard. Seated on the couch, I could turn to smile at the person next to me. That person was Shawn, and I was looking at him but I wasn’t seeing him. I don’t know what I saw—what creature I conjured from that violent, compassionate act—but I think it was my father, or perhaps my father as I wished he were, some longed-for defender, some fanciful champion, one who wouldn’t fling me into a storm, and who, if I was hurt, would make me whole. When Grandpa-down-the-hill was a young man, there’d been herds of livestock spread across the mountain, and they were tended on horseback. Grandpa’s ranching horses were the stuff of legend. Seasoned as old leather, they moved their burly bodies delicately, as if guided by the rider’s thoughts. At least, that’s what I was told. I never saw them. As Grandpa got older he ranched less and farmed more, until one day he stopped farming. He had no need for horses, so he sold the ones that had value and set the rest loose. They multiplied, and by the time I was born there was a whole herd of wild horses on the mountain. Richard called them dog-food horses. Once a year, Luke, Richard and I would help Grandpa round up a dozen or so to take to the auction in town, where they’d be sold for slaughter. Some years Grandpa would look out over the small, frightened herd bound for the meat grinder, at the young stallions pacing, coming to terms with their first captivity, and a hunger would appear in his eyes. Then he’d point to one and say, “Don’t load that ’un. That ’un we’ll break.” But feral horses don’t yield easily, not even to a man like Grandpa. My brothers and I would spend days, even weeks, earning the horse’s trust,

• From Educated (2018)

  money saved,” Dad said. “And your mother’s got some tucked away. We’re going to change it into silver. That’s what people will be wishing they had soon, silver and gold.” A few days later, Dad came home with the silver, and even some gold. The metal was in the form of coins, packed in small, heavy boxes, which he carried through the house and piled in the basement. He wouldn’t let me open them. “They aren’t for playing,” he said. Some time after, Tyler took several thousand dollars—nearly all the savings he had left after he’d paid the farmer for the tractor and Dad for the station wagon—and bought his own pile of silver, which he stacked in the basement next to the gun cabinet. He stood there for a long time, considering the boxes, as if suspended between two worlds. Tyler was a softer target: I begged and he gave me a silver coin as big as my palm. The coin soothed me. It seemed to me that Tyler’s buying it was a declaration of loyalty, a pledge to our family that despite the madness that had hold of him, that made him want to go to school, ultimately he would choose us. Fight on our side when The End came. By the time the leaves began to change, from the juniper greens of summer to the garnet reds and bronzed golds of autumn, that coin shimmered even in the lowest light, polished by a thousand finger strokes. I’d taken comfort in the raw physicality of it, certain that if the coin was real, Tyler’s leaving could not be. — I AWOKE ONE MORNING in August to find Tyler packing his clothes, books and CDs into boxes. He’d nearly finished by the time we sat down to breakfast. I ate quickly, then went into his room and looked at his shelves, now empty except for a single CD, the black one with the image of the people dressed in white, which I now recognized as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Tyler appeared in the doorway. “I’m l-l-leaving that f-f- for you,” he said. Then he walked outside and hosed down his car, blasting away the Idaho dust until it looked as though it had never seen a dirt road. Dad finished his breakfast and left without a word. I understood why. The sight of Tyler loading boxes into his car made me crazed. I wanted to

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I didn’t shrink and grow plumes like the Wart in The Sword in the Stone, who was transformed by Merlyn into a merlin as part of his magical education. I had loved that scene as a child. I had read it over and over again, thrilling at the Wart’s toes turning to talons and scratching on the floor, his primary feathers bursting in soft blue quills from the end of his fingers. But I was turning into a hawk all the same. The change came about through my grief, my watching, my not being myself. The first few days with a wild new hawk are a delicate, reflexive dance of manners. To judge when to scratch your nose without offence, when to walk and when to sit, when to retreat and when to come close, you must read your hawk’s state of mind. You do this by watching her posture and her feathers, the workings of which turn the bird’s shape into an exquisitely controlled barometer of mood. A hawk’s simpler emotions are easily perceived. Feathers held tight to the body mean I am afraid. Held loosely they mean I am at ease. But the longer you watch a hawk the more subtleties you see; and soon, in my hypervigilant state, I was responding to the tiniest of cues. A frowning contraction of the crines around her beak and an almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes meant something like happy; a particular, fugitive expression on her face, oddly distant and reserved, meant sleepy. To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand its moods. Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next. This is the sixth sense of the practised animal trainer. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. Notice what it notices. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to ‘tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’. Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It’s part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That is why the girl who was me when I was small loved watching birds. She made herself disappear, and then in the birds she watched, took flight. It was happening now. I had put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  I stood alone beneath brightening skies or rainy weather, determined to find out if Vine Deloria was right, determined to discover if God was different than what I had been raised to believe. I did this as a lament, a confession of my own spiritual confusion. I did it because I took my spiritual self seriously. I went seeking some answers to my dilemma, searching for the right path to follow to religious integrity. In short, standing up there on the windswept roof, in the least likely place as the least likely seeker, I began a vision quest. But was it “a vision quest”? Does what I describe from my own experience qualify as such? How do we define a vision quest? How do we understand it? In 1890, the same year as the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee (see Chapter Four ), James George Frazer published his landmark book, The Golden Bough .6 Frazer, a Scottish anthropologist, pioneered the study of comparative religion and myth as a scientific project. He collated and contrasted religious stories, identifying common themes. In so doing, he set in motion generations of European and American scholarship. He was followed in his research by figures such as Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, and perhaps most notably, Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces .7 Among the lines of research all four followed was the question of how human beings search for and obtain spiritual knowledge. These academics sought to trace the origin and nature of the “quest” in human mythology. They studied thousands of stories through scores of cultures. Their conclusions vary, but there is a thread that runs through much of their analysis. A hint of that thread is contained in the title to Campbell’s book: the quest made by a heroic figure. Unpacking the combined academic legacy of anthropologists and psychologists like Jung and Campbell is more than I will attempt to do here, but I will highlight that notion of the quest as being heroic because I believe it opens a door into the difference from the “vision quest” as it is understood by European and Native American cultures. From the European tradition, we may think of the medieval knight, the Arthurian hero, setting out to seek the Holy Grail. This romantic image speaks to a spiritual psyche of long standing in the West. The story of the valiant spiritual seeker, facing danger and temptation, searching for an elusive prize is a powerful spiritual metaphor for European-based cultures. It is certainly one that is shared by other world communities, but it is a hallmark of Western story-telling. The Grail legends are classic examples of this understanding. They have long roots in the tribal cultures that created European civilization and their popularity in the many variations on the King Arthur saga indicate how strongly the myth of the hero is present in this shared history. I also suggest that they blend into European interpretations of Christianity.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Then a woman with a frizzed fringe put her hand upon my arm, and tilted her head and said: ‘Well now, pretty boy, you look like a lively one. Fancy payin’ a visit, to a nice little place I know ... ?’ The success of that first performance made me bold. I returned to Soho for another turn, and walked further; and then I went again, and then again ... I became quite a regular at the Berwick Street knocking-shop - the madam kept a room there for me, three days a week. She early on found out the purpose of my visits, of course - though, from a certain narrowing of her gaze when she dealt with me, I think she was never quite sure if I were a girl come to her house to pull on a pair of trousers, or a boy arrived to change out of his frock. Sometimes, I was not sure myself. For on every visit I found some new trick to better my impersonation. I called at a barber’s shop, and had my old effeminate locks quite clipped away. I bought shoes and socks, singlets and drawers and combinations. I experimented with bandages in an effort to get the subtle curves of my bosom more subtle still; and at my groin I wore a handkerchief or a glove, neatly folded, to simulate the bulges of a modest little cock. I could not say that I was happy - you must not think that I was ever happy, now. I had spent too many miserable weeks at Mrs Best’s to be anything other than wretched in my room there: I was bleached of hope and colour, like the wallpaper. But London, for all my weeping, could never wash dim; and to walk freely about it at last - to walk as a boy, as a handsome boy in a well-sewn suit, whom the people stared after only to envy, never to mock - well, it had a brittle kind of glamour to it, that was all I knew, just then, of satisfaction. ‘Let Kitty see me now,’ I would think. ‘She would not have me when I was a girl - so let her only see me now!’ And I remembered a book that Mother had had once from the library, in which a woman, cast out, returned to her home to care for her children in the guise of a nurse. If only I could meet Kitty once again, I thought, and woo her as a man - and then reveal myself, to break her heart, as she had broken mine!

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  I was searching for an authentic way to be both a Native American and a Christian. I wanted to understand how to live a spiritual life in a traditional Native American way and be a disciple of Jesus Christ at the same time. The path I sought was not separation or syncretism. I did not want to be “bi-spiritual,” practicing a bit of Native tradition one day and a bit of Christianity another. I also did not want to gloss one over the other, adding a few feathers to my Christian theology, or following Native tradition with my fingers crossed. I wanted to be able to genuinely live as a traditional Native person, embodying all of the values of my ancestors, practicing the ancient religious sacraments of my people, and do so as a Christian who could say the Nicene Creed without hesitation. It was something of a tall order. As I traveled around the indigenous world I found that there were lots of Native people who chose one or the other: either they practiced their traditional religion or they went to church. There were many others who were “bi-spiritual,” practicing both at different times. But I had not met a Native teacher who could help me see how the two could be brought together without sacrificing the integrity of either. Therefore, I went to the Dakotas to stop chasing the answer. I decided to stay in one place to see if the answer would find me. In the Dakotas, there were other Native Americans who were Episcopalian like me; the first convocation of these Lakota Christians had begun in 1870 and has continued every year to the present day. There were a large number of Episcopal parishes served by Native American clergy and lay leaders. At the same time, there were many Native people who practiced their traditional faith; there were traditional ceremonies and medicine people to interpret their meaning to me. I thought if I could stop anywhere to wait for enlightenment, the Dakotas would be a good place. For a young Native man wanting to understand how to live in two worlds at once, this was the place to be. The irony is I did find what I was looking for, but not in the place I expected. In my romantic imagination, I believed I would find my answer in a religious ritual or ceremony, either Christian or Traditional. I thought the answer might come to me high on a hill doing a vision quest, in the womb-like darkness of a Sweat Lodge, or in a camp meeting out on the prairie. The vision I had from God had been a little like that; it had surprised me during my ritual of morning prayers in Cambridge. But in the end, the answer found me sitting in a chair.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  It is the impulse to go find God that has been part of who we are as human beings since the very beginning of our historic journey before we were separated by culture, before we looked different from one another, perhaps even before we spoke a language. Millennia ago the quest began in tree tops and on savannahs. It began with a few of us looking skyward. It began with some of us lamenting the death of a loved one. It began with a single one of us sitting alone, choosing to be alone, leaving the safety and comfort of the troop, the family, the tribe to set out on a search for something that had no name or definition. The urge to step over the boundaries of what we see to see something we can’t see, the desire to understand more deeply why we are here, the feeling that there is another life out there, a mind or a person, a spirit or a presence, greater than us. All of that is the thread of our wondering that winds through human life from before history to the end of our history. The four vision quests of Jesus are the most critical part of that long search for truth. From the Christian point of view, they are the keys to our search for meaning. From the Native American point of view, they are the visions of the Native Messiah. They are the core of his experience. They describe nothing less than God’s vision quest on earth. They are fundamental to our understanding of Incarnation. Each vision quest is a piece of the puzzle of Christology. They give us a name for Jesus, a way to see how he conceived of his own mission as the Messiah. The four vision quests embody the concept of “messiahship.” They show us the fulfillment of the Native Covenant. Consequently, for all of these reasons, understanding the four vision quests of Jesus is central to the quest of all humankind to find balance with the Creator. These visions are at the center of the circle. They are the Good Medicine for which we have been waiting. In the end the four vision quests of Jesus will begin a new rhythm in our hearts, a drum beat that will slowly move us to step out into the circle of life, to be close to our sisters and brothers, to pass beneath our ancestors in the land of spirits until we see the vision God has intended for us and learn our new name as God’s people, the name our Messiah taught us when his quest and ours became a dance. Chapter 5THE CLOWNWhat is so funny about John the Baptist? According to the gospel of Matthew, not a lot. In the third chapter we are introduced to John with an attention to detail that almost no other biblical figure receives.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Secular nationalism had exploited and distorted a religious ideal; but a religious embrace of the modern nation-state could be equally dangerous. Well before 1967, Orthodox Jews had sacralized the secular state of Israel and made it a supreme value. A somewhat despised religious version of Zionism had always existed alongside the secular nationalism of most Israelis.65 It became slightly more prominent during the 1950s, when a group of young Orthodox, including Moshe Levinger, Shlomo Aviner, Yaakov Ariel, and Eliezer Waldman, had fallen under the spell of the aging Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who regarded the secular State of Israel as a “divine entity” and the Kingdom of God on earth. In exile it had been impossible to observe the commandments tied to the Land; now there was a yearning for wholeness. Instead of excluding the sacred from political life, Kookists, as the rabbi’s followers became known, intended it to pervade the whole of existence once again—“all the time and in every area.” Political engagement, therefore, had become an “ascent to the pinnacles of holiness.” The Kookists transformed the Land into an idol, an earthly object that had absolute status and required the unquestioning veneration and commitment that traditionally applied only to the transcendence we call God. “Zionism is a heavenly matter,” Kook insisted. “The State of Israel is a divine entity, our holy and exalted state.”66 For Kook, every clod of Israel’s soil was holy; its institutions were divine; and the weapons of Israeli soldiers were as sacred as prayer shawls. But Israel, like any state, was far from ideal and guilty of both structural and martial violence. In the past, prophets had challenged the systemic injustice of the state, and priests had been critical even of its holy wars. For the Kookists, however, secular Israel was beyond criticism and essential to the world’s salvation. With the establishment of Israel, Messianic redemption had already begun: “Every Jew who comes to Eretz Yisrael, every tree that is planted in the soil of Israel, every soldier added to the army of Israel constitutes another spiritual stage; literally, another stage in the process of redemption.”67

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  125 pure passivity of inner contemplation was achieved, lower forms of prayer and meditation, as well as the pursuit of virtue, were useless. Quietism picked up on Spanish themes, especially the concept of dejamiento, abandonment, or letting go, which may have entered the Keswick movement from Madame Guyon, a semi-Quietist writer admired by Wesley and other evangelicals. Semi-Quietism is the label given to the Francois F énelon’s theology of pure love, condemned by Rome. Fénelon picked up the notion of not willing salvation from the writing of Saint Francis de Sales. Francis’s focus is on love rather than intellect. He develops an Augustinian psychology of love as the desire for union with God. He raises new and un-Augustinian questions, however, when he suggests that the higher forms of love involve a holy indifference to anything but God’s will. “Pure love,” for Fénelon, meant loving God without the sel ¿ sh desire to ¿ nd happiness in God. To condemn the aspiration for such pure love is to insist, with Augustine and Aquinas, that the desire to ¿ nd happiness in God as one’s ultimate goal is not only necessary but morally right and essential. The appeal of pure love theology is a symptom of a key challenge posed to Catholic theology by modernity, with its denial of inherent teleology in nature—so that pursuing the goal of ultimate ful ¿ llment, which is the essence of medieval Christian ethics, comes to seem sel¿ sh. Ŷ de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle. ———, The Life of Teresa of Jesus. Suggested Reading 126 Lecture 34: Catholic Mystical Theology 1. Do you think mystical theology is a valuable form of religion? Why or why not? 2. Do you agree that there is something wrong with the idea that pure love of God involves no self-interest at all? Questions to Consider

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I visited the Palace only once, and that was in the company of my parents, who came to reassure themselves that Miss Butler was still sensible and good, and to ask for further particulars of the shadowy Walter Bliss.I had Kitty to myself for no more than a minute, while Father chatted with Tony and Tricky, after the show. I had feared all week that I had imagined the words that she had spoken to me on Sunday evening, or misunderstood them entirely. Every night, almost, I had woken sweating from dreams in which I presented myself at her door, with my bags all packed and my hat upon my head, and she looked at me in wonder, and frowned, or laughed with derision; or else I arrived too late at the station, and had to chase the train along the track while Kitty and Mr Bliss gazed at me from their carriage window, and would not lean outside to pull me in ... That night at the Palace, however, she led me to one side, and pressed my hand, and was quite as kind and excited as she had been before.‘I’ve had a letter from Mr Bliss,’ she said. ‘He has found us rooms in a house in a place called Brixton - a place so full, he says, of music-hall people and actors that they call it “GreasePaint Avenue”.’Grease-Paint Avenue! I saw it instantly and it was marvellous, a street set out like a make-up box, with narrow, gilded houses, each one with a different coloured roof; and ours would be number 3 - with a chimney the colour of Kitty’s carmined lips!‘We are to catch the two o’clock train on Sunday,’ she went on, ‘and Mr Bliss himself will meet us at the station, in a carriage. And I’m due to start the very next day at the Star Music Hall, in Bermondsey.’‘The Star,’ I said. ‘That’s a lucky name.’She smiled. ‘Let’s hope so. Oh, Nan, let’s only hope so!’ My last morning at home was - like every last morning in history, I suppose - a sad one. We breakfasted together, the five of us, and were bright enough; but there was a horrible sense of expectation in the house that made anything except sighing, and drifting aimlessly from job to job, seem quite impossible. By eleven o’clock I felt as penned and as stifled as a rat in a box, and made Alice walk with me to the beach, and hold my shoes and stockings while I stood at the water’s edge one final time. But even this little ritual was a disappointing one. I put my hand to my brow and gazed at the glittering bay, at the distant fields and hedges of Sheppey, at the low, pitch-painted houses of the town, and the masts and cranes of the harbour and the shipyard.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The room seemed to have darkened since we entered it, and I felt colder, suddenly, than I had all summer.I heard her take a step. In a second she was sitting beside me again, and had taken my hand from my brow. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I have something to ask you.’ I looked at her; her face was pale, except for its cloud of freckles, and her eyes seemed large. ‘Do you think that I look handsome today?’ she said. ‘Do you think I have been kind, and pleasant, and good? Do you think your parents like me?’ Her words seemed wild. I did not speak, but only nodded wonderingly. ‘I came,’ she said, ‘to make them. I wore my smartest frock, so they would think me grander than I am. I thought, they might be the meanest and most miserable family in all of Kent; yet I will work so hard at being nice, they’ll trust me like a daughter.‘But oh, Nan, they’re not miserable or mean, and I didn’t have to play at being nice at all! They are the kindest family I ever met; and you are all the world to them. I cannot ask you to give them up ...’My heart seemed to stop - and then to pound, like a piston.‘What do you mean?’ I said. She looked away.‘I meant to ask you to come with me. To London.’I blinked. ‘To go with you? But how?’‘As my dresser,’ she said, ‘if you’d care to. As my - anything, I don’t know. I have spoken to Mr Bliss: he says there will not be much money for you at first - but enough, if you share my diggings.’‘Why?’ I said then. She raised her eyes to mine.‘Because I - like you. Because you are good for me, and bring me luck. And because London will be strange; and Mr Bliss may not be all that he seems; and I shall have no one...’‘And you truly thought,’ I said slowly, ‘that I would say no?’‘This afternoon - yes. Last night, and this morning, I believed - Oh, it was so different in the dressing-room, when it was just the two of us! I didn’t know then how it was for you here. I didn’t know then that you had a - a chap.’Her words made me bold. I drew my hand away from hers and got to my feet. I walked to the head of the bed, where there was a little cabinet, with a drawer in it. I opened it, and took something from it, and showed it to her. ‘Do you know this?’ I said, and she smiled.‘It’s the flower I gave you.’ She took it from me, and held it.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  28 19), 727 BON JAY מִי‎ Tb ;*דז‎ 6. impf. NaN ONY Jb 6° O that my request might come to pass/ 14°31"; impf.+1 19%"; 6. pf. YT, 23° 0 that I knew! (+ 3783128); 6. pf. consec. Dt 5+. | ₪. permit, c. acc.+inf,, yhap ANTS mds Gn 20°(E), 61. 317 (E) Ex 3” (J) Nu 207 215% (JE)-+ oft.; 6. ל‎ pers. + inf. 2Ch 20"; other constructions are: ” 1? נ'‎ j2 לא‎ 1 not thus hath permitted to thee ; לענ \גר"‎ now אםדאֶתִּן‎ W132‘ צ‎ 6% give thyself (>) no rest La2™, give him (2) no rest Is62°. h.=ascribe glory, etc. (acc.) to (>) God 186° Jb 36%, esp. imv. 7613" Ezr 10" y 68* cf. 1151 (so 357, v. an’ 4); to man 18 18°°; unseemliness (775M) to God Jb1”. i.=apply, devote heart to seek out, acc. + inf. Ee 17 8° Dn 10”, ל‎ ab /2 Ee = attend to; conversely נָתַתִּי אֶלַדלְבִי‎ ays Ee g'=all this I set before my mind, 7°; also (with subj. diff. fr. ind. obj.) מה אֶלְהִי נתן אֶלדלְבִּי לעשות‎ Ne2’cf.7°. j.=employ, devote money (acc.) מועֶר‎ baie ny oy Ex 30"%(P). | 1. give offer- ings, “2? Nux8"(P), 7 תֶּרוּמַת‎ Ex 30% (P), ef. give spoil to (?) Dt 20% י')‎ subj.) ; 1902 97% Ed 1 Ch 29”; offering to (?) idols Ez 659; esp. to Moloch Ly 207, to pass through fire to (5) M. 18% 660. 1.=consecrate, dedicate to (?) " 1 3 1 Ex22"(E). m. give a sign or wonder, acc. 1 K 13%% + pers. Jos 2” (JE), with reflex. ל‎ Ex 7° (P), alm.=display, exhibit; ef. FIA WN Ez 27" they set forth, eahibit thy splendour; עינז‎ DIDa JM כִּי‎ Pr 23% when it sheweth its sparkle in the cup. MN. = pay, wages (acc., +sf.), 12% כ'‎ Gn 30'8(E) he hath paid my hire, Ex 2°(E) Dt 24”, cf. Is 61°; 45 pers. Je 22"; a price, O20 נ'‎ Nu 20" (JE), 3H jAN Jon 1% i.e. paid his fare, passage- money; money (as) price (מחיר)‎ 1 K 21% cf. השָדָה‎ D2 נ'‎ Gn23"(P); pay money for (3) something Dt ז‎ 4% wealth for (2) love Ct 8’; tax or rent, c. acc. rei + ל‎ pers. Gn 47" (J); fine (c, id.) Ex 21° (E) Dt 22”, acc. om. v”, cf. probpa i) Ex21™(v. (פָלִיל‎ MI כ'‎ v'*(i.e. pay forhislosttime),i¥5) {13/2 v® (pay redemption- money ; all B), of.) WI פפֶר‎ WN 2) 30" (P); pay votive offering (c. acc.+ (ל‎ Lv 27% (P); a wager (c.ace.+9)Jur4". 0. ¢. 3, give for (3) money = sell, ADI W2TENY NI 1 K 21%, ef. 162% 14” 1 Ch21”;—’3 Ez27 is trading term, but sts. connexion obscure and text dub.: gzve wares for (2) 27” (but rd. prob. ] for ב‎ 0 679 נחן

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Pleasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess. I want to say this early and often, to myself and to you. Sometimes when I bring up this work to people, I can see a bacchanalia unfold in their eyes, and it makes me feel tender. I think because most of us are so repressed, our fantasies go to extremes to counterbalance all that contained longing. Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.16 Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves. Some think it belongs to them, that it is their inheritance. Some think it a sign of their worth, their superiority. On a broad level, white people and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough … or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them. And so many of us have been trained into the delusion that we must accumulate excess, even at the cost of vast inequality, in order to view our lives as complete or successful. A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous. So rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough. How much sex would be enough? How high would be high enough? How much love would feel like enough? Can you imagine being healed enough? Happy enough? Connected enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it? Can you imagine being free enough? Do you understand that you, as you are, who you are, is enough? Glossary Why a glossary? Language changes so quickly these days. The right way to speak about people, about identities, about gender, about geography—everything is in motion on a regular basis. I know that in writing this book I am creating something instantly dated. Given that god is change, there are some terms in this book that I want to be super clear about. Bitch is one of my favorite words. When I say it, I mean you are fierce, I love you, wow, that’s the boss, be yourself, yes yes yes.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I slammed the rusting door, and set off with my binoculars through a forest washed pewter with frost. Pieces of this place had disappeared since I was last here. I found squares of wrecked ground; clear-cut, broken acres with torn roots and drying needles strewn in the sand. Clearings. That’s what I needed. Slowly my brain righted itself into spaces unused for months. For so long I’d been living in libraries and college rooms, frowning at screens, marking essays, chasing down academic references. This was a different kind of hunt. Here I was a different animal. Have you ever watched a deer walking out from cover? They step, stop, and stay, motionless, nose to the air, looking and smelling. A nervous twitch might run down their flanks. And then, reassured that all is safe, they ankle their way out of the brush to graze. That morning, I felt like the deer. Not that I was sniffing the air, or standing in fear – but like the deer, I was in the grip of very old and emotional ways of moving through a landscape, experiencing forms of attention and deportment beyond conscious control. Something inside me ordered me how and where to step without me knowing much about it. It might be a million years of evolution, it might be intuition, but on my goshawk hunt I feel tense when I’m walking or standing in sunlight, find myself unconsciously edging towards broken light, or slipping into the narrow, cold shadows along the wide breaks between pine stands. I flinch if I hear a jay calling, or a crow’s rolling, angry alarum. Both of these things could mean either Warning, human! or Warning, goshawk! And that morning I was trying to find one by hiding the other. Those old ghostly intuitions that have tied sinew and soul together for millennia had taken over, were doing their thing, making me feel uncomfortable in bright sunlight, uneasy on the wrong side of a ridge, somehow required to walk over the back of a bleached rise of grasses to get to something on the other side: which turned out to be a pond. Small birds rose up in clouds from the pond’s edge: chaffinches, bramblings, a flock of long-tailed tits that caught in willow branches like animated cotton buds.