Three things from DAH.

DAH is me, David Anthony Hance. I pen, promote, and make change (not the coin kind). 

First up this week, Longing …  
"a yearning desire"
I'll add to that the long part. It isn't longing if the yearning is quickly done. For lots of life I've been too busy for longing. The thing right in front of me demanded attention. But lately I've been thinking about how much urgent striving I've done. And how little I recall gaining from that striving. Perhaps if I'd yearned a bit more. The combination of longing and striving could be quite satisfying. Even if the object is never achieved. Eternal anticipation: the long striving to satisfy longing. Is that a good life recipe? I long to know the answer.
43 Quotes About Longing for Someone

Second up this week, Lunging …  
"suddenly thrusting forward" (or not)
Lunging sounds so urgent and likely clumsy. I recall many lunging incidents from my younger days. In retrospect that lunging was indeed clumsy. But lunging also sounds like maybe we're fencing, which likely isn't clumsy. Thrusting, parrying, lunging, but skillfully and gracefully. Yet if you do a quick internet search for lunging the first results are likely about horse training. 
"When you lunge a horse, it moves around you in a circle on the end of a lunge line. Lunging is a useful exercise for both horse and handler. It is a way to let your horse safely burn off extra energy without you riding it and can help when teaching horse obedience." (from the site linked below)
I imagine I'd get rather dizzy, "turning and turning in the widening gyre" (thank you, Mr. Yeats). And both horse and trainer might long for closer contact, rather than growing tired and dizzy separated by a length of rope. 
How to Lunge Train Your Horse

Third up this week, Lounging …  
"being relaxed"
Our stern culture generally acknowledges striving (towards noble goals) as worthy. Idleness is seldom so admired. There's a tiny movement in favor of more lounging, less lunging, and perhaps even more room for longing. I used to subscribe to The Idler (an English operation). And I did enjoy Tom Hodgkinson's How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto. I just haven't ever been very good at lounging. Even our recent stay-at-home pandemic has left me longing to lunge (even the horse kind). The April 1st announcement of World Idleness Day, however, has made me reconsider lounging. 
Annual World Idleness Day Declared

And a a big bite more because it's National Poetry Month!

To Bring the Horse Home, by Julie Bruck
(after Philip Larkin)

Is all I’ve wanted past wanting
since I was six and delirious with fever,
an infinitive forged from a night
when giant ladybugs with toothpick
antennae patrolled my wicker nightstand.
Yes, I’ve been with horses since, 
travelled illegally with them in trailers,
known certain landscapes only framed
by alert ears, and with one in particular,
spent whole afternoons with her big jaw
heavy on my shoulder. Still, I hatched
plots to bring a horse to the house, to ride 
to school, to pasture one or even three
in the garden, shaded by that decorative
willow, which could have used a purpose.
But there were city bylaws in two languages,
and over the years, a dog, stray cats,
turtles, and many fish. They lived, they died.
It wasn’t the same. Fast-forward, I brought
the baby home in a molded bucket seat, but she
lacked difference, attuned as I was, checking
her twenty-four-seven. Now that she's 
grown, I’m reduced to walking city parks
with this corrosive envy of mounted police,
though I’m too old for the ropes test,
wouldn’t know what to do with a gun.
If there’s a second act, let me live
like the racetrack rat in a small room
up the narrow stairs from the stalls,
the horse shifting comfortably below,
browsing and chewing sweet hay.
A single bed with blanket the color
of factory-sweepings will suffice,
each day shaped to the same arc, 
because days can only end when
the lock slides free on the stall's
Dutch door, and I lead the horse in,
then muscle the corroded bolt shut.
That’s what days are for: I cannot rest
until the horse comes home.

And that's all for this week.
From Mary Oliver’s poem "Sometimes" …  

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it. 

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