Summer Daze

I am restless. I go through my days doing what I ought--housework, grocery shopping, laundry are the obvious ones....taking care of myself, drinking lots of water, taking vitamins, taking the dogs for a walk, going to the gym....then there's calling friends, writing letters, reading blogs--all the things I do to nurture important relationships and feel a part of things...there's also singing, reading, gardening, practicing piano, going to auditions, looking for a job. I know how to fill my days, or is it daze, with things that need to get done...so why do I feel such longing? Like a pain too deep to soothe or find the source. What would make this restlessness go away? A home at last to call our own? Little feet running through it? A job in the arts? A lead role on the stage?? Somehow, I just don't think so. Instead my thoughts go to pastel sunsets on the ocean. Majestic snow-capped mountains. Flying with the birds on the heights or swimming with schools in the reef. Watching a squirrel play with his tail in the colorful leaves, sending me into fits of giggles in unguarded delight. These things make me feel like I lost something or someone somewhere along the way--something that only the heart recognizes. C. S. Lewis has this to say about it:

Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been hints of it--tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

I weep even as I type Lewis' words. Why am I restless?? Because we all are! Or should be anyway. Should I apologize for this deep desire? Should I be more content? John Eldredge calls it a "haunting," that was designed to draw me closer to my Father, Creator and King. Perhaps the thing we all 'lost somewhere along the way' is our original glory? We long to return to the way things were meant to be...and WILL be again some day. Then, its OK. More than OK, its good. Do you feel this poignant longing? What do you do with it? Maybe you didn't know that you have it...All I can do is keep my heart open and alive to the quest. Its also known as the joy set before us...