Sacred Sexuality

My fantasy world has always been intense, dark. Like many of us, I was shamed as a child. And even if you haven’t read my blog posts from earlier years, you can probably image my experience as a woman in this world, with my own fair share of trauma from being both predator and prey. My imagination serves as a safe and fertile ground for me a be a sexual being, and yet the very essence of that energy craves an encounter with the Other and is insistent in its rebellion against restraint. I am increasingly less interested in understanding why I am this way, why the world sets women for these experiences, and why intimacy is so damn alluring and terrifying.  The juicer impulse is to share what my body holds – in its grief, its outrage, and its longing.

My body wants to melt away from lack of touch, from the simple pleasure of sensing the world around me through something below my shoulders. I want to feel the sun on my back, the soil beneath my feet, the breeze across my belly, the water swirling around my legs, petals between my fingers. I want to walk through a forest with you, touching everything, giggling in wonder and delight, and feel how the bark becomes our teeth and our palms become the leaves, and we can dance together as trees swaying in the wind. I want to explore the lava flows and meadows of your body and become the earth for your roots to burrow into. And I grieve, grieve that this mutual exposure has become one of shame and fear, an endless churning of the mind to navigate quicksand and ward off fangs, to smash barriers and grab a mouthful before dashing back to safety, shaken but cradling the flavor on my lips as precious. How can we not become both timid and obsessed in such a world?  And how can I not grieve when what is lost to me is what longs to erupt from such an encounter full-throated, wide-bodied, exploding scales and feathers, and trailing flames across the sky?

My outrage is that you, YOU the mass media-fed, sex-obsessed and terrified collective are bent on stirring up and tempting out of me the very thing you are determined to tame and deny all of us. Stop turning me on to sell ice cream bars, vacuums, and insurance packages. Stop showing me all the curves of my body should be on display in each minute detail while men get to roam free in expansive wrappings that allow some sense of privacy and mystery. Stop making me feel small and lonely for being unpartnered through every popular song and movie and novel. And stop telling me, for god’s sake just STOP telling me that if my vagina, and everything on my body that represents it, isn’t clean, healthy, and open 24/7 I can’t afford the pleasure, growth, and mutual exchange of a committed, loving relationship. Being in my power as a woman doesn’t mean embodying what men find most alluring, or being as firm, stead-fast, strong-voiced, and straight-backed as the masculine ideal of power.

Sex is everywhere. It’s in the round buttocks in yoga pants down every aisle of the grocery store. It’s oozing out of the angsty and provocative lyrics and melodies of every popular song. It’s displayed in every shop window, looming out of every billboard, and wafted over us in our attempt to smell anything but human. Even going to the museum, I’m bombarded by 2,000 years of penises, boobs, and Jesus – Lot holding his daughter’s breast as they flee from Soddom in flames. And all of this, all of it leaves me with the unsettled feeling that the world is conspiring to take from me something sacred against my will, that I must protect myself from being desecrated, but that if I do not surrender, I will be cast out as unwanted and irrelevant. I resent woman around me for showing off their bodies because men will come to expect something from me that isn’t for sale, even as I feel myself become coy and enticing when I wear the right color and spend some time on my hair to show respect to my workplace. It’s a trap with both exits blocked.

What I want to feel in the world and embody in my own life is a renaissance of idea of sexuality as sacred, as the most intimate encounter of the soul, as a profound expression of creative beauty, and the deepest experience of intimacy, trust, and mutual devotion. It’s not a commodity or a source of entertainment, it’s not a force for domination, control, or coercion. It’s not a tool for gaining self-esteem, acceptance, or security. These are all things we bring into our lives by being a good friend, being of service, having integrity and vision and speaking our truth.  Seeing sexuality used for these ends brings up outrage and grief in me in the purest sense of Francis Weller’s definition: “grief is a natural response to the desecration of something sacred.”

What this vision requires of me is a commitment to recognizing when I am sexualizing other social, emotional, and economic needs and finding more direct ways to meet them. If I am lonely, I need a friend. If I am bored, I need a challenge. If I feel ashamed, I need to make some art. If I feel insecure, I need to share my dreams. The bonus side benefit of this approach is that I have way more control over my well-being – I don’t have to wait for a partner to fill these gaps, and I won’t feel resentful and abandoned when the next one inevitably fails to do so.

This vision also requires me to reprogram my deeply-held belief that the most valuable thing I have to offer a man is sex. It requires that I fully embody and accept myself as the brilliant, timid, creative, nerdy, uptight, anxious, curious, day-dreaming person I am and know that I am far more than enough for someone to want to hang out with indefinitely and explore, create, and rumble through the canyons together.

And this vision requires me to change my relationship with sexuality itself – recognizing it as the purest, most untamed force that can visit me. It’s not something that will come when I call. It’s not something I can train to canter in a predictable rhythm. It will not be milked or bridled, and certainly won’t eat out of my hand. It’s something that shows up one day all claws and fangs and snarling. And then returns the next to purr and nuzzle. Some nights it sings and scatters stars across the ceiling, and the next it throws furniture out the window and sets the linens on fire. And some seasons it doesn’t come at all.  It’s born in a moment, fertile and alive between two open souls, and passing away when it wills. It might show up for a tour bus, but most likely it’s slipping through the shadows. Those who catch a glimpse are moved by something feral, powerful, and transcendent they will never be able to explain to someone who wasn’t there.

My sexuality is not for sale. It is not for mass consumption. And it is certainly not for putting on display. It is anything but cheap, but it is also offered freely to those who understand reverence and can approach the sublime as holy. It is nurtured in intimate and vulnerable places, places secure enough to welcome the wilderness. I am constructing that place in myself, with plenty of breath, and patience, and time. It moves through me as poetry, art and dance, speeches on the hills and melodies in my mind. And each visitation prepares me for a deeper encounter with Other.

Nancy