lily mock

Because life begins, every time, with longing. Longing is the match and life is what catches fire.

This is why I will always die on the hill of defending yearning, even in its clumsy, excessive, or misdirected forms. To want is to be porous to the world and to ache is to admit that life still has its hooks in you. Desire embarrasses us sometimes, God yes, but it also animates us, cracks us open and remakes us.

Love and heartbreak are the root of so much around us. Songs, buildings, startups, cathedrals of every kind. I wonder, if we could trace every act of creation back to its emotional source, how many would map to love? How many to spite, or ambition, or pure devotion to the game? My guess is love dominates, especially in art, where even mourning... See more

Desire is a blueprint for expansion, a tug toward something that doesn’t yet exist but might. If we never desired, we would never build, never leave, never create. Imagine the opposite: a world where no one wanted more. No bridges, no love songs, no rebellions, no symphonies. Just flatness.

It’s strange that yearning, one of the most basic forces of being human, has become countercultural. That to want openly is now seen as naïve, inefficient, or embarrassing.

To love is to let yourself be remade. To become someone else, not because you were incomplete, but because there are parts of you still waiting to be made real in the presence of another. And when you love someone like that, you offer them the same possibility: to explore their hidden selves and latent worlds, and to find, in your gaze, a home for... See more

In the end, maybe good friends and lovers are prompt engineers of the soul (forgive me for the AI metaphor). They suggest edits, and if we are willing to be warmed, rewoven, occasionally melted, the program of us runs cleaner, closer to what we hoped when we first began to write ourselves into being.

On the Sydney train, I sometimes like to play a quiet game with myself, where I imagine each commuter through the eyes of someone who adores them. The oil-stained man becomes a gentle, loving father. The teenage girl biting her sleeve becomes someone’s irreplaceable best friend. The elderly woman with the fierce stare becomes a widow whose late... See more