When I started reading about Buddhism, I was troubled by instructions to ‘give up clinging’. If we give up clinging, then where does that leave desire? Would we get anywhere in life without a teensy bit of desire? Is it really always a bad thing?

It was relieving to hear what Mark Epstein had to say about the subject in his book Open to Desire (and then later David Brazier in his excellent and highly recommended The Feeling Buddha). We can have a direct experience of desire (sitting with it, tasting it) without clinging to it or making demands of it. And that this is where the heat comes from – the heat that drives our engines.

The difficulty (as always) is to tread the fine line between fully engaging in our experience of ‘what is’ (I really want that cake) without slipping over into wanting to manipulate it (I MUST have that cake or I will never be happy).

But we don’t have to stop wanting the cake.

Well, that’s my reading of the books, anyway. Don’t take my word for it. Have a read of Epstein’s article In Defence of Desire on Tricycle – and make up your own mind. Here’s a quote from it:

We can treat desire the way we treat everything else in meditation. This means accepting it as it is, not pushing it away and not holding on to it. In Eros the Bittersweet, a big inspiration for my own book, the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson points out that desire implies the presence of three things: the lover, the beloved, and that which separates them. In other words, there is always a gap, an obstacle, impeding the union desire seeks. This obstacle seems like a problem, and we want to get rid of it. This is clinging. I propose that if you relate to desire in a different way—if you learn how to simply dwell in the gap it opens up—then desire can become a teacher in its own right. In practical terms, this means learning to desire without expectations.

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I can’t possibly write about desire without sharing my favourite Kunitz poem, which almost made it into my brother’s wedding ceremony. Maybe it’ll get into mine. If you read it slowly and enough times, I guarantee it will break your heart. Happy Thursdays, people.

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Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.