Eternal.

Tenaka, Withered Trees, undated

What is an unspoken hunger except an ever deepening lust that pulses through our identity with such vigor that we sense, but cannot or will not express, its desires for a union with and a commingling of our destinies with those of another, such that what happens to one exists also for the other. In some primal symbiotic encounter, we yearn for --and yet it eludes us-- a recovery of that dance from which we were born, grow, mature and decay. What is unspoken is the endless necessity of finding that ecstasy in the lives of others for whom we recognize that rhythm. We speak not about how by joining together, we experience intimacy unbound, and that discovery of reunion is fleetingly possible -- if only we dare.

Unspoken because in our gestures, our subliminally felt need to nourish one another eludes any words that can only accompany, but never substitute for, the actions of devotion and delight. Hunger because in our daily activity we crave but do not satiate that impulse to render all of our attention to those with whom we love to conspire; breathing together and invigorating one another's senses in ways that bind us back to the ancestral, if not original, union from whence we are banished in the birth pangs of differentiation and the labor of separating ourselves from one another.

The unspoken hunger dwells deeply, abides within my unconscious emerging as a sweet spring from beneath the parched earth tethering me in unimagined ways to all that has been here and all that sense here an eternal spawning of one thing as it turns entirely into another.

Terry Tempest Williams