Wanting Only

There are so many words for wanting: longing, yearning, lusting, lacking, craving, desiring, aspiring, dreaming, hungering… To want is to be human, to experience both the agony and the exquisite anticipatory movement towards what is beyond present reality. So, wanting is both spiritual and earthy. It is a relishing of possibilities (yes, fantasy!), but equally, a measuring of the lack at the heart of human life, a restlessness, and sometimes a turbulence: ‘Quick, said the bird, / find them, find them, / Round the corner. Through the first gate, / Into our first world, shall we follow…’ (T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’). Wanting Only is a set of poetic meditations on how humans – individuals and collectives – are transformed by what and how they desire.