The Humiliation of Desire

I've been noticing something lately - which is that often we humans go numb to our deepest desires....

....and instead we settle for satisfying shallow wants.

This makes sense: our real desires are vulnerable, tender, electric. Just feeling them can be almost painful. Plus, going after the fulfillment of such desires usually involves stretching out of our arena of comfort, taking big risks, enjoying some brushes with failure and shame.

So it's much, much easier to ignore these big electric desires and to instead settle for substitutes, distractions, addictions. 

For example, in my relationship with my husband - it's fairly easy for me to go into "sibling" mode with him and get overly interested in brownies and Pinterest boards...

... because opening up my heart and my body to feel the razor-sharp burn of my actual desire for him is humiliating. 

It cuts into my ego's pride, it puts to death the walled-off notion "I don't need anything or anyone!" and it brings me into the present moment. 

Interestingly, the word "humiliate" means "to bring down to earth" - it comes from the Latin noun "hummus" - meaning soil. 

The force that brings us down to earth is gravity, and as my coven-mate Crystal Woodling reminded me recently - the force of gravity is an oft-used metaphor for the force of love, desire, Eros.

In our modern culture, we delight in resisting gravity, the Eros that connects us to the earth.

We sleep on beds in houses lifted up from the ground; we drive cars that let us move much faster than gravity would let our legs carry us; we travel on airplanes.

All of which is cool, but it can have the strange effect of making us settle for distractions and abstractions rather than the actual disturbing heat & magnetism of our raw desire.

So I'm curious - what gravitational pull are you resisting right now? 

What deep, electric, humiliating desires are you covering up with easier, ego-friendly substitutes like social media and sugary treats?