The Grace of Desire and Suffering

I continue with Rapunzel’s story…the barren couple wish for a child, and then at some point there is another desire. “One day when the wife was standing at the window and looking down at the garden (the one surrounded by a high wall and belonging to a sorceress), she noticed a bed of the finest rapunzel lettuce. The lettuce looked so fresh and green that her mouth watered, and she had a great craving to eat some. Day by day the craving increased, and since she knew she could not get any, she began to waste away and look pale and miserable.”

There are two aspects to the story here I want to focus in on, the first is that the wife “notices” and then that she “desires.” The state of barren-ness in whatever form that takes (spiritual poverty, emotional poverty, schizoid encapsulation), is not always noticed: compulsions that keep one encapsulated go unabated, or one lives within a state of perpetual boredom and ennui.

To “notice” that one is in a state of barren-ness and stagnation requires an act of grace because the state of being encapsulated is not an easy one to break through. A clue in how the “noticing” may occur, comes from examining where the craved for lettuce sits. It is in a garden behind a high wall. This high wall is a division and perhaps psychologically, this division is the partition between consciousness and unconsciousness. The garden thus is part of the unconscious life of the individual. For the lettuce to sit in the unconscious, is to say that new life emerges from this part of the psyche. It is the soil from which new possibilities grow. The act of grace that I often observe in psychological growth, is the emergence from unconsciousness of new possibilities, including those things previously repressed and forgotten.

When these acts of grace occur, when those green things from the inner garden are “noticed,” desire emerges: now I want, now I crave, and perhaps now I suffer. What was previously encapsulated and locked away, now I see and now I crave. This is sometimes first experienced as a real suffering for what was previously not seen, and this is often the first step in moving closer to what was previously encapsulated. It is then with this kind of craving, that action begins. Amyemilia wrote “if wishing is all we do then nothing changes, action is required.” Action begins after what is missing is noticed, and when the craving becomes a matter of staving off “wasting away,” in other words, it becomes a matter of psychological survival.