I was struck by the phrase “a desire for a higher lovemaking” when reading Goethe’s poem “The Holy Longing.” It felt like something I had been longing for and striving toward perhaps my whole life in one way or another. Perhaps we all are, even in our physical lovemaking, striving for a higher sense of connection and intimacy and, yes, ecstasy, with the people and things we love. With life itself.

It comes when, as Goethe writes, we throw off our “obsession with darkness,” refuse to let it take hold of our thoughts and our days. Then “in the calm waters of love-night” (where we “were begotten”) a “strange feeling” comes over us: this rapturous experience of something higher and lighter than we’ve ever known.

These days I look for that kind of higher love-making taking place between me and the simple pleasures of life.

I found it last night when I walked outside to catch the last of the full moon shining through the oak leaves and spreading its moon shadows across the hillsides.

I feel it now sitting here writing to you while listening to the soft jazz notes of Miles Davis on my playlist.

I felt that rapture years ago when I unexpectedly discovered Dali’s wondrous illustrations at his museum in Bruges and just now while searching online for his Song of Solomon image to place at the top of this post.

Connection, intimacy, ecstasy all rolled into one. Soft and sweet, ever near, ever new, each day.

When we throw off our obsession with darkness, light sweeps us upward. Then anything can become a kind of higher love-making.

The Holy Longing

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,

because the mass man will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive,

what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,

where you were begotten, where you have begotten,

a strange feeling comes over you,

when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,

and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.

Now, arriving in magic, flying,

and finally, insane for the light,

you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

–Translated from the German by Robert Bly