This morning, I woke with a question: what need does Worth Wanting meet, and what urgency? Freshness is not driven by exigencies or necessities; nor is encountering. So then, what? Then I remembered this:
Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)
Edna St. Vincent Millay – 1892-1950
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
The first eight lines say it more clearly than I could. Making friends is a need with its own kind of urgency, and distinct from whatever drives or presses us in the ever-perishing mundane. Making friends with freshness is livingness itself.