The start of Cancer season this year brought a flood of intense longing into my being that lasted for days. It’s a familiar feeling that used to overtake large swaths of my life in its all encompassing storm of fluctuating emotion from pure elation to absolute suffering. There was always a sort of spiritual tone to it, a knowing that there is a kind of holiness in being capable of feeling that level of intensity while still being somehow soft for life. A sadistic reminder of the inherent agony and bliss of being in a human body cut off from the divine (or so we perceive) and under a spell of separation from all things yet able to utilize our body to try and understand unity through perception, touch, emotion, and all the senses.
In queer community longing has been widely expressed in nearly every creative medium. This deep yearning caused by separation from love and embodied communion1 reasonably feels like a natural response for anyone whose desires and being-ness have been met through time with hatred, fear, policing, shame, stigmatization, fetishization, sexualization, and violence. My specification of longing here holds the understanding that queer longing contains an infinite level of expressions which also include sexual expression as one of those vast experiences. I think heterosexual frameworks for understanding connection sometimes lack the capacity to recognize just how expansive expressions of love and devotion to a life of love within queer experience can truly be, and often are, partly from being shaped by the experience of longing.
Of course longing is not a feeling unique to lgbtq experience, yet the particular expression of it as tied to love and a sense of being free to experience fully that expression of love within the world does feel especially relevant and meaningful. Even for those who were embraced with acceptance from family and community have likely been unsuccessful in personally escaping the pervasive intolerance that still permeates so much of our culture. Longing is a universal experience and I’m not that interested in categorizing it in ways that try and contain it. The word queer has always held a comforting sense of boundlessness for me and I think speaking of a queer longing references embodied queer experience and also creates space for the greater collective to find their own stories that are worthy of paying attention to within it. There is an offering for anyone here about learning how to patiently and fully devour life.2
I’ve always found it interesting how similar the narrative of being in the closet (or just being gay in a small town) and longing for a love that feels fully out of reach oddly parallels the ecstatic search for the divine via lifestyles of isolation, solitude, and religious discipline. To court God or the divine (or insert whatever name evokes this for you) is a path of longing. It is also a story of longing for love. Some of my favorite love poetry comes via mystics yearning for God. I sort of believe that all gay people are mystics in their own right. Really if you’ve ever experienced prolonged states of longing no matter how you identify you probably understand at least a little bit about courting God.
For me personally, the search for the divine and the longing for queer love have always been intertwined. I was raised Bahá’í and the take on homosexuality was it’s fine to be a gay Bahá’í so long as you never speak about it openly or act upon the desire. Basically you were committing to a life of chastity and silence. So already, to be queer in this context was a vow of devotion to God in a way that was completely separate from the expectations of straight believers.3 I have found it interesting how easy it can be for those who never had this experience, especially as children, to truly never have it cross their mind just how absurd and damaging this expectation is. My intense and deep affection for the divine began through this lens.
At that time in the late 90s early 2000s sexuality outside of heterosexuality was rarely if ever brought up in my religious community, except when it appeared my taste in music was becoming concerning and worthy of policing. There was a deafening silence around it all that made it sort of worse in a way, like it must be really evil if we won’t even say the words out loud. When there is no conversation it isn’t even possible to love the sinner hate the sin. I did not have a church yelling at me about how I was going to hell, actually Bahá’ís don’t really believe in hell, but I read things on my own and knew I had to somehow control this sickness I was harboring and do so without anyone finding out. I was pretty terrible at that which was probably obvious to anyone actually paying attention.
The governing body of the Bahá’í faith hasn’t made any official statements about their views on homosexuality since 2014. Being such a young religion, the actual holy texts cannot be re-interpreted. There is clear language and law here that leaves no room to breathe. Their last letter is difficult to read without becoming a little bit irate because it nearly completely ignores the impact of these beliefs upon queer and trans children being raised within the faith. It speaks simply to the non-judgmental view Bahá’í’s should continue to hold while reminding them of how it is a choice to enter into this covenant with God when entering the faith and how Bahá’í laws are not meant to be applied to those outside their religion. What about the children who are held in the arms of these communities and then left alone with their longing? What about all the prayers that didn’t save them? What about the blood that becomes toxic from shame? This is a fucking problem.
And so, my longing morphed into the whole wilderness. Falling in love for the first time was like complete deliverance. Getting my heart broke for the first time was an actual existential crisis. It’s impossible to look back at these experiences and not see the divine over and over again. I traversed all the pleasure in longing, the forever intoxicating, mysterious, life giving, life taking, and overall exhilarating force that it is. The journey felt fated and cruel most of the time. Left wondering what was wrong with me and why the hell I was being pulled into more and more heightened extremes of this particular feeling experience via emotionally charged situationships, confusing triangulations, provoking unrequitedness, and an inability to stop myself from completely opening my heart to love with beloveds who are literally on other continents (particularly brutal during a global pandemic). Oh but the longing is splendor and the secrets contained inside are worthy of all this devotion and more. Being obsessively invested in self awareness and a decade of therapy also paid off eventually here too. I see it all as necessary, recognizing the worthiness of living out longing and also finding pathways to satiating communion with self, others, and the divine.
As I aged in my longing it eventually became its own sacred portal of awakening to unconditional love. If you are devoted to traversing longing to the very ends of this earth I promise you will come to understand what I mean. Something just happens when you let yourself be completely destroyed by the love running through your being. It feels like there is no place for it to go until you pierce your own heart and watch it pour into everything around you. Then suddenly that wound is an eye opening and the body softening to the reality of love’s face, absolute in every form, longing to be close to you.
Not for the faint of heart. I think most religious leaders wouldn’t be willing to go so far to touch their beloved as the queer lover laying on the kitchen floor demolished by their own longing. Same as many of them didn’t know what to do with their own saints and mystics, overcome by the ecstasy of communion. Light fills the body and overflows.
My own experiencing of longing transformed after years of forming the emotional and spiritual framework that could fully hold me, nurtured by seeds planted from a mutual longing that was nothing short of holy. The type of love that has you reevaluating your resentments or the deep grief around why things have happened the way they have and just feeling fucking awestruck by life exactly as it is. Even when it’s over, especially when it’s over, and still meeting you somehow over and over asking for your heart to crack a little further for the mystery. I don’t experience longing as much anymore since riding that all the way through. Mainly because my entire relationship to the divine changed as result, it was suddenly so tangible and available to me and all my love.
In astrology, Neptune holds the archetype of longing in its most potent form as it is tied to the longing for home, for source, for complete dissolution back into the whole. Anything that comes into contact with this planet in a chart indicates what it is one might long for. This intimacy with longing has given me so much respect for the gifts Neptune offers the collective. There is a sacredness in all forms of longing. There is an unfolding and offering to either surrender or be consumed. We can follow our longing into the abyss, let it pull us through until we see how it sees—love pressing up against us as every particle, or stop in the dark each time with arms crossed.
When I look at this blip of a moment in our collective history and see so much animosity for queer and trans expressions of love and embodiment I think about longing. The longing that does and will continue to drive each precious being toward love no matter what any governing body has to say or do about it. The longing that will befriend them, haunt them, and point them toward all kinds of experiences that covertly ask them to remember the love that is their birthright. A longing that inspires creation, togetherness, heartbreak, rage, devotion, and pleasure. I think of longing and feel sad that so many people never allow themselves the chance to truly experience it.
embodied communion is my way of describing all forms of physical intimacy, feeling the warmth between bodies, playing with someone’s hair, crying in the presence of another, holding an object made for you by a love, a fully entwined embrace, touching your own body with adoration, sharing the same drink, the delirious sleepy stage of long phone conversations, spooning, painting someone’s nails, being part of another person’s orgasm, etc etc etc..
no matter how seemingly grand or minuscule to others, learning to cherish the nuances of your own satisfaction and joy is the point
I am not touching at all on the views of chastity and sexuality in general held by this religious institution and many others which promise their own whole host of psychological grief and paths to disembodiment, fear, and shame in their own right, but I want to shout out those who resonate with queer experience perhaps because of this type of upbringing or any situation which imbedded longing into their being. No human is immune from a sexual story, a love story, and all levels of hurt and liberation within that story. I hope leaning into queer and trans experiences of freedom to love and be wholly embodied might embolden every person to understand their own power and find ways to face the child inside who still wants to love and to express that even if they are terrified.
co-creative astrology 