SEX AND LOVE
What does love have to do with it?
So sings Tina Turner, and what is she wailing about to such charged and thrilling effect? She is saying, perhaps, that one of life’s possibilities is to just get down, and naked and happy, and “ball” away, and let the animal in your be deeply satisfied.
Not just the warmth of flesh to flesh and the brain and body delight of tongue to tongue and the relief of simple minded, or almost no minded, pleasure in the moment, but the discharge of overloaded and worried and hurried and unfocused nervous systems, coming together to focus on the pleasure of being alive.
Zippie, zowie, eh?
This hints toward that, me thinks, this many people’s favorite poem by Mary Oliver:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
This wild warm flesh in us knows how to love
And wants to be and know and live what it knows.
And it is not a thing to rush, and not a thing to force into action with the tom toms of loud music, or the crashing of ecstatic drugs, or the thrill of hidden secretive adulterous “affairs.”
Love, sex, the warm flesh, they know how to met under the sheets and on the meadow, and even, hints of future pleasures, in a slow sweet dance either indoors or out, but it is the natural that leads to the super natural. Supernatural is the norm when we slow into the reality of how amazing life has made the possibilities of joining in the magic and only real NOW.
So, what the heck am I saying?
Read those sentences again. They aren’t meant to be textbook linear. This is not a book for the left brain, nor for the right, nor for the wrong, nor for the correct.
This is a working manual of liberation, and at any moment, even this darn sweet one, Right Now, we can waken to the bliss and sweetness of human/ beyond human existence on this planet, this blue water green plant brown mud, grey cloud, gold leaf, red blood, purple mountain majesty Earth.
And what is our, my, your answer so far to the Tina Turner taunt: What does love have to do with it?
Perhaps, letting the mind slip into old categories, the above ramble seems to imply: love isn’t part of the deal. It’s the geese and the soft warm flesh and the mud river otter and the happy frolicking puppy inside us that sex is satisfying, and what does love have to do with that?
And good old left brain, either/ or land says, nothing. Woopie, just “go for it,” and no brainer is happiness.
And I say: no brainer is non life because you and I can’t stand talk walk crawl live a second without our brain, so in a way (and this will be a whole other chapter), the common and to my mind (and perhaps mine alone) depraved use of the slogan “no brainer,” shows A., the diminished brain of the speaker of this cliché ( add 24/7, and my plate is full, and you’ve got a “full plate” of nonsense behind which to hide from reality), B, how out of touch our present society is with the fundamental characteristic of humanity: our ability to use our brains to learn.
Unfortunately, we can also use our brains to wire ourselves deeper into our ruts, including our clichés, and what does love have to do with THAT?
Everything.
Because love can only be fresh.
To make love to another is to make something out of the given materials, but to lift up to another level, to make as if the make a house or a pair of pants or a shirt or a deck or a garden.
To make love is to construct something beautiful between two people and then the very sweet questions comes round to where it should be: what does sex have to do with it?
Because a mother can make love with her baby bringing it to her nipple, or helping her child up from a fall and smiling and touching the hurt knee and being in sympathy and delight with the child for moving forward enough in their adventure to have a “mistake.” (There are “throw away” phrases as we go along here, that could be an entire essay. Maybe they will be by the time the book/ manual is finished.)
And two people can make love by sitting down and speaking slowly and clearly, looking in each other’s eyes and hearing their own voice and enjoying their own and the other person’s breathing and feeling gratitude for the listening and gratitude for the discovery of what they are saying in this very moment.
And in this very moment, I can ask again, and you can read and hear and perhaps think about this: what does Sex have to do with making love?
Cover up the rest.
Rest the word reader in you.
Take a walk short enough so you don’t do chores and get distracted and long enough so the tall and foot worthy animal in you and the breather in the world of motion can come back to the center of your understanding of who you are. And while you walk in this way, feeling your feet, and feeling your breathing, and delighting in the sounds and sights of the swish of Now, have somewhere in their the wonderment: what does sex have to do with it?
Really: short walk. Plan and succeed to come back to this thought river ramble gift exploration.
Go.
Okay, I walked and my legs were alive.
Do you ever sense your entire leg, from toes, all five toes, up to your hip joint, and then add on the other leg, all five of its toes and all of the whole big amazingness of it up to that hip joint?
Legs are a big part of the real estate of the body. Humans got upright and ran down game, and made the game of life a grand adventure, and when sex gets involved we go below the navel and awaken to the big amazing motion of life.
And that, of course is only part of the answer, if there is any answer.
Sex is motion.
Sex is interaction.
Sex is the lure into the present.
All that helps love: there is another person.
That person is fine wonderful amazing, yes, thank you, thank you.
That person is “in it” with us, back and forth, we have something to say, they have something to say.
Life is good.
In the present, they are what they are. They don’t have to be something tomorrow. They don’t have to have been better yesterday. They are filling up our now with the delight of their now and our now wowing along together.
If we are lucky, we don’t quite know what we are doing, or how it’s going to shift and play and change.
And love is play. Discovery: who are you.
And sex is play. Discovery: who are you. Who am I?
And love and sex are discovery: who are we? What can this we make together?
Sometimes it can make a baby.
Sometimes it can make love, or make a bigger brighter fresher more amazing love.
And isn’t that fine?
The above is the third chapter in a book, Backs, Necks, Sex and Brains, that should be done by March of next year. If you perhaps want each chapter as it rolls out, let me know, and perhaps we can make an arrangement to "buy forward" the book in it's unfolding.
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