"Human in the Only Way that Matters"

Indications of yearning

I’ve been thinking lately about desire paths. About the way that wanting always finds a way. Refuses to conform. Bends between right-angled arms of concrete. Uncivilized. Feral. True.

Desire paths, if you haven’t heard the term before, are “tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers.” (As described by writer Robert Macfarlane.) J.M. Barrie, in reference to off-track trails wending through Kensington Gardens, called them “paths that have made themselves.” You’ve seen them in parks short-cutting the distance between one paved path and another. Desire paths are the evidence of wanting. They exist where people want to walk, not where they are supposed to walk.

From above, a desire path is soft and furry. It warbles and wobbles. Festoons itself with unkempt foliage. Attracts litter and leaves. Grows wide to accommodate muchness. It’s not a thing you go looking for. It springs itself upon you as you’re striding down the route recommended by all advisors, authority figures, and Google maps. One minute you’re safely on the straight and narrow, no surprises from here to the horizon, and the next you’re veering left, like, “Oh! Let’s see where this goes!” On the screen your blip is out of bounds. Google is rerouting, ellipses, ellipses, ellipses.

The best things in my life have happened when I said, “Oh! Let’s see where this goes!” When I warbled and wobbled. When let myself follow the want. When I diverged.

Portugal, for example, was never a plot point in the official plan for my life. It was a detour not approved by the planning committee. No sensible person would devise a meander so ill advised—uprooting your perfectly ordered life for a pandemic-hatched plan of transplanting yourself to a country you’d never set foot in?! But sensible people are the same ones who have regrets on their death beds.

I have been sensible for most of my life. Buried desire inside of goodness. Wasted years worrying about propriety. Never dreamed I’d hook such a wild left turn midway into middle age. And yet. Here I am.

As someone who has always felt things intensely (“big feelings,” my mother used to say), wanting has been for me an exquisite ache. I have always found myself wanting: to know why and how and when and what then; to see more, do more, be more. My wanting made me reach, and then reaching became a way of life. Not that I am incapable of being satisfied. My life has moved through so many incarnations that were good, renditions in which I was content. But those stories are never static. Never stagnant. There is always change, either surprising or sought-after. Life is always evolving, and I am always wanting.

Recently, Jeannine Ouellette of Writing in the Dark shared some thoughts about wanting that are so resonant and profound, they knocked me off my feet…

“At the center of all deep wanting, lies grief, because to want is to risk want unfulfilled. However, desire is also to recognize that fulfillment, however fleeting, can be divine. Both truths at once. This is why the moment just before getting what we want can be so exquisite, almost unbearable, because it holds both the longing and the nearness of the longed for, the wound and the cure, and that moment can never last. The arrow is never more perfectly itself than when it is in flight.”

…to desire is to be porous, open to the world, unwilling to be finished, and desire is a way of embracing the inevitability of incompleteness. People who have stopped wanting have not necessarily found peace. They have found stillness, which can stem from peace, yes, sometimes, but also from inertia, from exhaustion, from hopelessness. To desire, I would argue, is to be fully alive.”

Over and over again in recent years, I return to the idea of openness. Expansion. Of allowing myself to feel all the feels, the bright and the dark. Refusing to close myself off from the thorny throes of pain, grief, rage. There’s been no shortage of that pointed sting in the world at large or close to home. “Remain tender and full of rage,” is a phrase I’ve tucked beneath my wing as it feels like the right kind of mantra for turbulent times. (And what times aren’t turbulent, in one way or another?)

So I feel my big feelings and I let myself expand. My mind. My heart. My capacity for complexity. I unfurl. I grow. I reach. I want.

“Desire,” said poet Jane Hirshfield in her essay Six Small Meditations on Desire, “is the wish for anything to be other than it is. …For a poet, the allegiance to fearless opening is the only practice possible.”

Desire often gets characterized as greed, or dissatisfaction, or something solely erotic. You want a specific someone. You want them to want you back. You check your phone for a fresh text every five minutes, four, three, two. The thought of their skin against your skin is a prayer. Your entire body a nerve ending.

But there are a million-million manifestations of desire. We want things all day, each of us, every day that we are alive. Want sleep and sun and sustenance. Want company and solitude and silence. Want music. Want dancing. Want a routine, a vacation, a library book. Want a good hair day, a crisp linen shirt, a soft-soled sandal. Want a negative test result, a sudden miracle, a comforting hand on the shoulder. Want to be a better person. Want to finish what you started. Want to close your eyes and leap. Want a blue sky, a fresh-picked fruit, a flamingo sighting. A long walk with a good dog. Want no news but good news. Want to get the fuck out. Want to find a way home.

Desire as curiosity. As sorrow. As artistry. As epiphany.

“To want something on the path to our completeness is a different kind of wanting,” Jeannine Ouellette wrote, “it is the wanting of becoming. In this light, I say, go ahead and want something. Want it so fully it makes you foolish. Want it even knowing you will want something else later. This kind of wanting is a willingness to be human in the only way that matters, which is the way of opening and opening and opening, even when it hurts, because sometimes, it will.”

Perhaps we should all be foolish more often. Unwilling to be finished. Always writing our stories, letting the plot veer off in unexpected directions.

What if we want and want and want some more. Step away from the pavement. See where the footpath takes us, or forge a few that are entirely new. Pledge our allegiance to fearless opening, to finely-pointed arrows forever in flight.

more poems from Isabelle Correa

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Copyright © 2026 LaDonna Witmer • {all photos by author}