Three things: A Marilynne Robinson talk, a t-shirt at the farmers’ market, and election night.

"When she had been married a little while she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate." This is a line from Housekeeping that one of the audience members quoted as her favorite. I remembered having underlined it myself, and it still rang true to me. I believe it speaks to the something’s missing-ness of our day to day experience.

I saw a T-shirt at the farmer’s market with an illustration of a hummingbird. The cartoon bubble above its head read “it will all be different when I learn to breath fire.” I know this is true too. If I could only “breath fire”, or “fill in the blank”, THEN my life would settle into some sweet spot that others must surely enjoy but that I can’t seem to find. I understand in theory, that this is complete crap. I’ve had content moments without breathing fire – but it required a dedicated immersion in what was, and a focused levity that curbed the critical voice.

A dream I once had, illustrates this. I had been flying,(the best thing in a dream!) soaring over the world and re-living some creation myth – father sky/ mother earth and all that. It was an incredible feeling, until I realized I was an “I” who was dreaming. When I realized this in the dream, I fell from the sky into the water and was devoured by crocodiles. Total buzz kill. It will all be different when I learn to breath fire.

Marilynne also spoke of longing as a “frustrated richness of experience” that we are “creatures of greater depth than our senses and experience can satisfy” And I remembered the lecture in college of some philosopher who proved the existence of God by our capacity to imagine something as perfect as God. How could we imagine it, if it wasn’t? Which now seems like flawed logic – but I wondered is this was where she’s going? That the root of the longing is towards God? She quipped that most people believe in God when the moderator asked her what God was. (I gathered he didn’t believe in God.) I don’t want to go into the existence of God on a blog – but against the notion of longing as some kind of movement towards God. I think the truth is much simpler. When we recognize our inherent aloneness, longing arrives. (Way better than crocodiles, in my opinion.)To me, that longing doesn’t need to travel so far as to find an omnipotent being. It must just move toward the people and creatures who surround us – and if possession does nothing to mitigate our longing, then maybe that is just fine, so we continue to reach out and include more people into our lives.

Which takes me to the election, a shift in tone, and the capacity to imagine something better than what is.

I heard others’ worry about the election. While I felt invested, I trusted I was doing all I would and felt resigned to let history carry me one way or the other – knowing full well that we can only throw so much of our weight in one direction or another. And then it got closer. For two days, I felt the visceral tug of anticipation. I can only describe it as what an animal must feel right before an earthquake or a violent storm. I was WIGGY! And everyone I talked to had the same feeling –my Canadian co-workers were going to election parties, people from Toronto were campaigning for Obama. Everyone was jumpy. I was at the polls 5 minutes of 7, where we all chatted expectantly. No one could concentrate at the office. We were still there when they called Pennsylvania, we squealed across the building, and then dispersed to be with our loved ones.

There were many places to be – and despite my insistence that I didn’t want to run around like a chicken with our heads cut off – a good friend and I hit one big party, two restaurants, three bars, high-fived total strangers, and then drove around to various neighborhoods our arms out the windows and sunroof, honking at throngs of people just to hear them say “HOORAY.” And that never got old.

Here was a sweet spot, longing was sated, strangers were friends, we’d imagined something better and it arrived. (And of course, there is still room to imagine something better – repealing Prop 8.) While the next four years most likely won’t be perfect, this historic moment, is an inspiration, and hopefully our capacity to move against the “somethings-missing-ness” will bring more and more acts towards satisfying our longing for an inclusive and giving world.