WHAT WE WANT

It's not that we want so much. It's that we want so little.
My friend Veera shared this idea. It took me a while to wrap my brain around.
We go for such small things mostly. Thinking that's what we're worth. Some new boots. A house. My thinking keeps forming itself around half empty cups. LIttle knots of dreams. I don't know how it looks from ten thousand feet, I'm just thinking about the next three blocks or twenty minutes. This is where I find it so valuable to keep the possibilities open beyond what I can dream up. Not to clamp my fist around something shiny to look at, but to keep my palm open, let the thing blow out of my hand again, because it's so much greater what might evolve from that practice.
I've also heard it said that we dream in apples, and  [     ]  dreams in orchards. Perhaps, as Rumi put it, we are the whole orchard, not the worm in the grape, as it sometimes seems.
It's not that we want so much. It's that we want so little.
Here's the Rumi poem called
The Worm's Waking
This is how a human being can change.
There is a worm
addicted to eating grape leaves.
 
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.
 
He is the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that does not need to devour.
 
 
from the Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.

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