Remembering What I Ache For

I woke up this morning, my face wet with tears, hearing the opening lines of “The Invitation” echoing from my dreams: “It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for.” I pressed my hand to the ache in my chest.

I know why this comes today. Last night I went to hear CBC radio’s Eleanor Wachtel interview Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and Things I’ve Been Silent about. Azar was inspiring- in the true meaning of that word- an in-breath of Spirit that lifts and reminds us of what we thought we could never forget: that the fostering of imagination and ensuring the free expression of our creative impulses are as necessary as bread and air and water to the life of human beings.

Caught up in the flotsam and jetsam of daily life, the painful story of separation, the wearisome details of getting information to lawyers, of sorting what to leave behind and what to gather for the next leg of the journey, I have wandered far away from the truth Azar speaks of and embodies with grace and elegance.

Azar lives in Washington DC and is from Iran. She told us stories about about men and women in Iran being jailed and killed for reading books we in North America could find on any library shelf. And she spoke with embodied passion about the power of literature, of story, of art to create and chronicle meaning, to stir the imagination for finding solutions in an increasingly complicated world, to ensure true democracy by educating citizens in different ways of perceiving and thinking and imagining the world.

And I remembered why I have read and written all of my life. I remembered how much I ache to write. At one point Azar said, “We write to retrieve what is lost,” and I wanted to weep. When we write or paint or compose or dance (or do any other kind of creative work) we retrieve parts of ourselves we did not even know were lost- the stories and characters that have peopled our lives, the meaning that was waiting to be uncovered and co-created, meaning that sustains us and can sustain our people (and who are not our people?) Receiving others’ creative expressions we expand our own vision, stir our own imagination and open ourselves to a broader, deeper wisdom.

Totalitarian regimes know about the power of the imagination and creative work, which is why they respond with what Azar called “naked violence” in an effort to control and curtail both.

When I wrote a book about doing our creative work I titled it What We Ache For, because I know this to be the central ache in our lives: to participate in creation by allowing the imagination to move us, lift us and guide us in offering something to the world. Our lives offer us a wealth of experience- the raw material of daily life- that can be spun into the gold of the stories and images and songs and movements that guide us in co-creating a world birthed in the imagination of possibilities.

Loss, as Azar pointed out last night, presupposes possession. We cannot lose what we never had. And those who have lost what we take for granted- like the men and women in Iran risking their lives to read or write forbidden poetry and stories- help us remember, value and participate in what we have been given.

I ache to write: stories, books, poems. And I am grateful to remember that I must trust this longing, must set it at the centre of my life.