Hankering

"The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry." Simone Weil

Each evening, usually around 11:00, Fanny, my local raccoon, makes the rounds of the back deck. Apparently the tracks for the sliding glass doors attract all kinds of tasty morsels, especially moths this time of year worn to exhaustion in their attempt to reach the lights inside. She makes a thorough search of every one, pausing once or twice to give me a far less inquisitive look than I give her. Like all the creatures of the natural world, she knows what will satisfy her hunger and diligently searches for it.

Everything in our world is hungry and all life, including us, is built around the attainment of it. In the real world there is an exquisitely balanced system of who eats what and who. We of all the life forms on earth are the only ones who are not a designated supper. The comforting part of that is the relative safety it provides. We don't have to be constantly on the alert for who wants to eat us. The challenging part arrives in discovering being at the top of the food chain isn't the free lunch it looks to be because out of all the life forms on earth, we alone appear to have hungers we cannot satisfy with food. We have to feed not only our bodies, but our minds and spirits too. This kind of hunger seeks meaning in life, a relationship with the numinous and love for another. When we are aware of this part of ourselves we transcend our humanness into its highest form by creating music, poetry, literature. We experience our faiths and all our feelings deeply and compassionately. We value beauty in all its myriad forms. We treasure the earth and each other. When we are not aware, when we do not see beyond our physical appetites, we slip back down into the mire of who eats who.

Knowing what we truly hungry for may be the most important awareness we develop in life. In the south we have the word 'hankering'. It means there is a little unexplainable yearning in us that wants to be fed. Sometimes it may only be for homemade peach ice cream, but sometimes if we take the time to diligently search for it, we can discover it is for something far more satisfying.