The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kidd

All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.

To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all. I swore an oath to set down their accomplishments and praise their flourishings, no matter how small. I would be a chronicler of lost stories. It was exactly the kind of boldness Mother despised.

“A man’s holy of holies contains God’s laws, but inside a woman’s there are only longings.” Then she tapped the flat bone over my heart and spoke the charge that caused something to flame up in my chest: “Write what’s inside here, inside your holy of holies.”

Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the

largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.

There was a tiny fire in them, an expressiveness I could see even from where I stood. It was as if his thoughts floated in the wet, dark light of them, wanting to be read. I perceived amusement in them. Curiosity. An unguarded interest. There was no trace of disdain for my wealth. No judgment. No pious smugness. I saw generosity and kindness. And something else less accessible, a hurt of some kind.

The vision was a promise, was it not, that the light in me would not be extinguished. The largeness in me would not shrink away. I would yet become visible in this world.

discovered God’s secret name: I Am Who I Am.

as a government free of Rome with a Jewish king and righteous rule, but also as a great feast of compassion and justice.

I knew of no one who put compassion above holiness.

For me, he would be I Am Who I Am, the beingness in our midst.

the most curious feeling came over me, that I was always meant to arrive at this moment.

was a peacemaker and a provocateur in equal measures, but one could never say which he would be at any given moment. In this moment he became the peacemaker.

“I’m more concerned with what’s in your heart than what’s in your bowl.”

It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead.”

Had he ever prodded me to be a good woman? Not once.

“Little Thunder, I won’t judge the knowing in your heart or what choice you make.”

We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

For a woman to birth something other than children and then mother it with the same sense of purpose, attention, and care came as an astonishment, even to me.

but only later would I think of the snake biting its tail, how the beginning becomes the end that becomes the beginning.

There was an incongruous peace in my helplessness, in the knowledge that what was done was done and could not be undone, and even if I could change it, I wouldn’t.

Of all the emotions, hope was the most mysterious. It grew like the blue lotus, snaking up from muddy hearts, beautiful while it lasted.

“To avoid a fear emboldens it,” she said.