Desire and Its Role in Regeneration
It is human for us to desire.
Desire shows us what we truly value and identify with as authentic to our becoming.
It isn’t inherently destructive—for it is a fuel. A life force.
It shows us what would make us feel safe, happy, and nourished.
The question, then, lies in how we channel the desire within us.
We have often associated desire with extraction—wanting more, gaining more, acquiring more than what we deem sufficient.
And because we live in a world where people are either taught to “desire less” or “acquire more”, we have severed our healthy relationship with desire itself.
But what if desire can be regenerative?
What if desire can be a force to co-create mutually beneficial relationships—not just with other people, but with Earth itself?
If we know Mother Gaia/Mother Earth as a nurturing force that desires for everything on Earth to be properly nourished…
And we know the Universe to be an expansive force that continuously wishes to give…
Then it means that abundance is, indeed, our birth right.
Both the Earth and the Universe want to offer us abundance and generously provide us with what we need for safety, happiness, and sustenance.
How do we, then, allow ourselves to have a healthier relationship with desire while respecting the finiteness of our natural resources and our capacities as human beings?
This is an invitation to treat abundance as a relationship.
We may fall into that narrative trap of thinking that desiring is evil—and that abundance, in its subjectivity, is destructive because of how widely varied people’s desires are.
But, perhaps, we can allow ourselves to remain abundant by mirroring that same generosity that both the Earth and the Universe has for us.
For that to happen, we need to check the root of our desire.
Is it rooted in ego and domination or life and connection?
Is it to gain power (which, ironically, is a manifestation of outsourcing our power to something external of us) or to empower our vitality?
As we fulfill this desire, does it regenerate or deplete the resources we have?
And if we treat abundance as a relationship, then we allow for reciprocity.
To give back. To pay forward. To share.
If we anchor our desires in regeneration, then we may truly feel and embody how it is less about continuous consumption.
We, then, realize how it becomes more about nourishing ourselves in a way that also nourishes the source of our nourishment.
Because at the end of the day, as Chief Seathl wrote in his letter, “This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
We are stewards, not owners, of the land we step on. We are part of the web, not the rulers of it.
In co-creating a new Earth where everyone lives in harmony within and around them, we are reminded that desire, if left unchecked, may move in extremes.
We either punish ourselves for diminishing our desires and play small, or we inflate it into overextraction—which, in turn, still becomes a punishment to our capacity to love and respect.
And so, if abundance is our birth right, we hold that birth right with responsibility.
That responsibility comes from stewardship—from regenerative relationships we nurture between us humans and the whole ecosystem.