What Are You Craving?

Also: what my cravings are leading me toward.

I normally eat up the year-end review and new-year reflection. I love spending hours journaling about all that has passed and what I hope to see in the future. This year, it fell flat. None of my usual prompts or rituals sparked anything for me. After a few tries, I gave up. In its place, cravings began emerging—cracked and parched cravings from the soul depths.

As in:

I am craving an unhurried mind which is to say a quiet mind. I’m craving sleep. Also, rest. Both are needed and too often taken to be identical but stand the difference between a gift for the body and a gift for the soul. Which is also a craving—the body. I am craving a strong body by which I mean a capable body.

I’m craving water, or should I say immersion. I’m craving the table and nature and a look in the eye. I’m craving words, always words. Stories, memories, and conversations. I’m craving discovery, my curiosity leaping to go. I’m craving my own voice, ready at times to vacate the listener's seat. Also, my voice among a choir of others, a blending and knitting, which is really to say, I’m craving community and shared action—let me be thy keeper and you mine.

I’m craving a seat at my own fire, among my many selves, out across the plains, away from the city, near the edge of a forest. It’s time. I’m craving turns and returns but both on my terms.

Again, the mind. Unhurried and quiet which is not empty but rather focused. Clear and sharp and ready.

All these cravings and more.

I have been thinking about how to meet them, which is a question of how to meet the self. I feel as I often do: an urgency not to let myself down. I want to commit fully to this critical work of befriending and caring for the self, to make myself seen and prioritized by me.

It has begun with a return to the kitchen for dinners with J and immersing myself in the lake at least once a month, every month, no matter the cold. Now I am preparing for another exit from social media. Here the mind begins to quiet and refocus. Again, the urgency to care for myself well is imminently present in this personal season that is revealing itself not necessarily as one of change or even adjustment but rather of deepening. More of the same but deeper.

I’ll be taking a break from social media during February to focus on all of this and contemplate whether a more permanent exit is what I need. As a writer trying to *make something* out of her words, leaving social media feels counterintuitive, even wrong. But the work I’m leaning toward is asking more of me, so I’m following my gut and ridding myself of the distraction. Substack will remain my sole online focus during that time. You can always find me here where I’ll continue to share smaller peaks of life through these somewhat weekly essays.

Here’s to honoring our cravings—may you feel yours out and follow them wherever they lead.

Much, much love,
Angelina Danae