What the Lindworm Wants
Why our desire doesn't get spoken
This week in our men’s circle, we watched a short film. Martin Shaw, sitting in a field somewhere, telling an old Norwegian story about a prince born as a Lindworm — part human, part serpent. Deformed from the start. Hungry. Exiled.
A king and queen, desperate for children, make a wish at a crossroads. Twin sons are born, but the first comes out as a serpent, a Lindworm, and slithers into the forest before anyone can look away. The second grows up a prince.
When the prince sets out to find a bride, the Lindworm blocks his path: you cannot marry until I do. The king and queen bring the serpent home and women are brought to him one by one.
Each morning, only bones remain.
Until a shepherd’s daughter is summoned. An old woman finds her on the road and gives her counsel: have twelve gowns made, each embroidered around the heart. On their wedding night, the Lindworm commands her to shed her gown. She holds her ground — you first. He sheds a skin. She removes a gown. Back and forth they go, skin after skin, gown after gown, until the last layer falls away and what remains is a man. Raw, new, never seen before.
When it ended, I asked the men: what do you desire?
The room got quiet in a particular way. The quiet of discomfort. Some deflected. Some went intellectual. Some named things cautiously, like they were approaching something that might bite.
I recognized it. I’ve lived in that quiet for a long time.
I’ve come to understand that the shame I carried around desire wasn’t really about the desire itself. It was about the gap. I knew that somewhere underneath everything that life had to be bigger than what I had allowed myself. And if I admitted that, really admitted it, it would have felt like a death. The death of the story I’d been telling myself about why things were the way they were.
Worse, that with all my dreams and passions, I built a very defensive, fear-fueled, small life for myself.
So I didn’t admit it. I kept the desire deformed. Exiled. Circling.
That’s the Lindworm. Not a monster. A prince who never got to take his proper shape.
The only thing that finally works in the story — really, the only thing that reaches him — is someone who doesn’t flinch. Who stays in the fire. Who keeps shedding until they’re both raw and something new becomes possible.
I don’t think desire is the problem. I think the exile is.
If you could mold
If you could mold this unbelief into the sore fatheadedness of my youth, would you?
I want to leave the barren vegetarianism that is Father and just free on the fatty steak of His thigh
wrestling forever with the heavenly-sent Prophet Devil my whole happiness at stake skewered, pierced more fanfare than experience
To my relationships vertical and horizontal I offer myself doused in gasoline tied to a stake by micro chickenwire light me up, O God and warm Yourself