The four hungers that drive you
I keep circling round this idea, this truth that is trying to show itself to me. I keep seeing this picture: one flow, composed of three other flows, aligned and organized by a fourth.The first three flows are light, love and life. The fourth is something else - something less obvious, less clear. It is a gesture that uses and works with the other three - a flow that crosses boundaries and creates the braid.I want to say that it's the soul. But that never feels quite right. It feels as if there is a hunger to create, to transmute the formless into form; to make alchemical potions and pull ideas down to earth, to plant seeds in soil. This is what I have so far.We are hungry and curious creatures - and out of our hungers, we reach. Just as plants intrinsically reach roots into soil to find water and leaves to soak up sunlight, so we humans also reach.We reach with our minds, seeking the light of awareness, illumination and information; we reach for answers to our puzzles, our questions, our mysteries. We are questing constantly for interesting ideas, engaging projects, new concepts to captivate our curious minds. Even after sleep, we awake, already reaching: What did that dream mean? What will I do today?We reach, also, with our hearts, these miraculous muscles that maintain our lives with their generous and steady 'lub dup, lug dup' even as they generate 'L' energy, a measurable field of resonance that discerns and detects the people and places that 'just feel right' to us; while constantly calibrating us into vibrational harmony with the world around us.We reach with our bodies - for breath, for food, water, warmth and stasis; and when things tilt out of balance, the body reaches out to us with symptoms - a pinch of pain, a stuffy nose, a headache - to let us know we need healing, chicken soup, sleep.We reach also with our voices, speaking out, singing our song; with our hands, weaving, knitting, building. We synthesize, using the other forces - light, love, life itself - and making something new.We stand at the center of an entire universe of reaching and receiving; a 'call and response universe,' where our hunger is both a signal and a summoning force. Through hunger's call and the world's response, we create everything we’ve got. Hunger builds communities, churches and empires; it inspires inventions, assembles collages, sparks medical breakthroughs and feature films. Hunger makes poets, artists, captains of industry. Together, hunger and it's partner, nourishment, create worlds.And yet, left raw and untrained, hunger can capture the will, making choices for us -choices that are often different from the choices we’d make if we knew we had a choice. As Laura Day teaches, “If you do not consciously direct your hunger, your hunger will use you and those around you.”How do you train this powerful hunger? Through alignment with the calling of the soul - the deeper hunger (and wisdom) that makes us reach for meaning and purpose in our live, that helps us translate our other hungers into alignment.It is the soul, the bridge of the human self to the ‘self’ of God, that connects our mind to the mind of God, and our heart to the living heart of the universe. For the soul is the seed of God inside of each of us.