Icarus and the Giant Clitoris

If we were all so open...maybe pain wouldn't be called such.  Because it would be shared.  And when it is shared it is somehow more comfortable, sweeter, unpainful.  It becomes a medium for connection. 

Happiness is Icarus flying skyward, on his own, delighting in the experience of individual corporeal incarnation - the freedom to be one.  Pain does not have a specific archetype (in this metaphor).  Pain is the mother of experience.  It is the impetus for surrender and the terrifying truth that we are all one, little nerve endings on the end of a giant clitoris.  All sensation is shared, regardless of the walls we build.

Why would it be terrifying that we are all one?  Because I am no longer... The reality of oneness suggests Katrina, in all MY beauty and insecurity and invented importance, is not real and never was.  All that righteous self-making, for what?

Who is the me that possesses the idea of Katrina anyway?  Could it be that happiness exalts the self, while pain dissolves it?  Does Icarus know that his elation pulls him to the sun, the heat, the perpetual orgasm that melts the wax in our wings and swallows our joyful bodies?

Strangers Die Every Day

I'm struggling today.  With death and birth and trying to understand.  Trying to do a good job.  Trying so hard.  All this gratitude and all this suffering at once.  I feel big and bright and lonely.

I'm giving a presentation tonight.  I'm proposing and working and all those things... but I feel  stuck.  What do we do with life?  There is so much to feel and explore and make - we stumble around in our glorious imperfections and get triggered and yell at our friends and then someone dies and it hurts so much because we opened up and then we ask, “Do I just keep opening to this pain?”

Strangers die every day.  (I had friends at Naropa who were in a band by that name).

Thank you for being someone I can write all this to.  Thank you for sharing dreams and searching for potatoes.

Sly's son jumped out of a window.  He was having a nightmare...that's what Sly thinks.  He didn't jump out of an open window.  He jumped through it.  Now his brain is dead and his body is alive because his organs will be someone else's organs soon.  Sly thought the crash from the other room was a painting falling off of the wall.  Then he felt a breeze and opened the curtain to see his son crumpled on the pavement.  His spine was crushed.

And who am I in this momentary, star-muted world?  What do we do when the ineffable happens for real?  I write a lot of manifesto-ish stuff, but now I feel so distant, so impotent to help my friend or even help myself understand emotionally what is happening.  I want to hug everyone...No, I want everyone to hug each other and hug me and why did I even put on mascara today?

Strangers die every day.

And I worry about love handles, bags under my eyes, whether to buy kombucha or kevita, if I'll ever make a lot of money...

And I realize that humans are superheros.  Because how do you suffer through suffering like this without being a hero?  This happens, terribly painful things, brilliantly painful things happen all the time and we keep going.  How is that possible?

Suffering, fear and pain are the stimuli for heroism.  It's what triggers the hero inside and what makes us such incredible creatures.  We love even when we know that as love deepens so too does the potential pain of loss.  It is a risk we can't not take.

People fall...in love all the time.  And strangers die every day.

Don't Be Worried

Everyone is a Hero

In the heat of late Oklahoma summer, in a beige 1983 cadillac, my Oma suffered the weight of a poorly placed wig and a broken air conditioner.

It was July 13th and with two broken wrists, Oma had elbowed her way into the clunky vehicle.  Her injury was the result of a drunken slip at the mailbox earlier that week.  She wore casts from knuckle to forearm and was crippled to most activities with her hands, so I don't know how she drove to the liquor store. 

Without the use of her fingers, she was unable to release the car door handle.  So she laid on the horn until a kind, Ma'm-speakin' fellow came out.  “Be a good boy and bring me a case of Jonny Walker Red,” she said.  And he, or someone, did.

Maybe she enlisted the help of a good samaritan to light her Newport.  Or perhaps she had a reservoir of energy set aside specifically for that task.  When the whiskey arrived and the exchange was satisfied,  she fore-armed her way back through the town, steering wobbly toward a happier afternoon.  Though her exit from the vehicle was awkward and untimely, her journey ended successfully.  She made it  to her bedroom and to the sweet sweet sound of Alex Trebek's voice, with all the answers.

It's Safer Not To Go Slow

There was the soft friction of his entry, of his stubble against my cheek, the smell of his waking breath.  Attentive fingers met my clitoris, gentle, morning paced.  I knew he was about to come and it turned me on.  I was so close.  But I didn’t postpone his release.  I let him come because I liked it and it meant I could leave the scary slowness.

Awkwardness is lost in speed, as are the subtle transitions from one flavor of pleasure to another.  These whiz past in a race to finish.  There is so much more in the slow.  It overwhelms me.

After the orgasm he collapsed on me.  I love this, love the heavy surrender.  My sensation continued to swim above there, delighted at the cessation of stimulation - free to feel, to stretch and expand without urge to continue.  The unprovoked dance of shape-shifting pleasure… pulsing contractions and g-spot lightening bolts.  Untouched, I almost came.  But then it all fell - in a lovely way, much like his fall - the pulsing and inner squiggles fell asleep.  I was still aroused, but he was sweetly dead on me and for a while I didn’t want to move. 

When he rolled over, I lied there, supine, idea-filled and wet.  I brought fingertips to nerve button and resurrected secret intensity.  My eyes, when I opened them, tracked dizzily across the ceiling.  There were lake sounds, the call of loons.  Rolling eyes and rolling mind, sorting through thoughts. I felt a little girl, breaking rules.  Was I betraying him by not sharing this?  It fueled the speed of rubbing.  I made quick, tiny circles.  So wet I could have been underwater.  Faster faster, on the edge of orgasm.  So close. 

Back and forth, little taps, quick circles.  My body sweating and tense.  Any moment I would melt around the point, I would dissolve into sensation.  I paused, then returned to it.  Thoughts swimming, drowning, swimming - broken into pieces.  Faster, finish, go, go, go, go, go!

Covertly touching myself with a promise of orgasm.  (It would mean success, freedom, perhaps even a morning nap which I desperately need).  Come, come, come, come, come, come!  

But it wouldn’t happen.  The forced-ness prevented its arrival.  How bad would I be anyway if I came on my own as he slept next to me?  

“Oh!  I’m sorry to wake you.  No, um, really it wasn’t that I didn’t feel satisfied, it was just that I didn’t want to bother you and, well, I thought it would be easier this way.  It would have taken forever.  You would become ambitious and then I would start to feel bad for not delivering after all your effort.  It might get awkward, you’d be bored and I would force some sort of apologetic smile.  

“And if that weren’t to happen?  Well,  if we were to go very, very slowly…I don’t know, the consequences could be even more serious.  I might cry.  I might remember something awful.  I might fart or fall in love with you or, who knows what?  I might just die.  No, better this way - fast and alone.  I know what to expect.  It’s safer not to go slow.”

Maybe I Should Have Sex With All of You

It happens in the moment I step out of worry.  When I stop to feel the breeze slink down my sweater and whisper across my thighs.  I start to feel pressure.  It isn't the kind of pressure that weighs down.  It doesn't descend from "out there."  It swells up inside me.

It builds as I listen to the satisfying clop of shoes on the sidewalk.  Sometimes it is in the passing of half-opened lilacs or the silver in her hair.  It gets bigger and bigger until I don't know what to do with myself and I crawl back into the safety of practical concerns.

Sometimes I fall in love with everybody.  When it happens (and I'm strong enough to feel it) I cry a lot.  I laugh at myself.  I cry because I'm laughing so hard.  If I'm out in public, I wonder if people  think something is wrong with me.

When I fall in love with everybody, I get confused about how to express it.  The geyser that erupts from the base of my spine and the warm, sloppy feeling that spills from behind my heart, make it hard to do anything.  My brain tries to make sense of the experience, tries to fix it.  It thinks, "Maybe I should bake cookies or write love poems.  Maybe I should give foot rubs, plant flowers, sing a song.  Maybe I should just have sex with all of you."

That's it!  I think of how much I would love to pleasure people and how much I would love to feel closer to them.  If I am naked and you are naked and we press ourselves together and rub noses - if we breathe into one another's mouth, drag our fingers lightly along the soles of our feet, if we get inside each other, maybe that will come close to a physical expression of this feeling.

Okay, maybe not everybody.  I only want to have sex with those who want it.  Not everyone is into laugh-crying crazies.  But that still leaves a lot of people.  I could be engaged for a long time.

I ponder my solution.

I don't realise at first.  I'm wrapped in fantasy.  Then I grow cold and lonely in the absence of expansive pressure.  The feeling has gone away, replaced by all these thoughts. 

The intimacy I crave is in the experience of unbearable sensation.  The pressure I'm trying to fix is the very thing I seek.  The sex is already happening inside me.

Feeling it is hard.  But in the moments when I can bear to be alone in the erotic heart-pain, I make love with everybody.

Before Breakfast

What happens in six minutes?  Somewhere an egg fertilizes, somewhere somebody dies, somewhere a person experiences orgasm.  Somewhere there are people crying, people shooting, people sneezing.  Somewhere a tree falls.  Somewhere a bird hatches.  Somewhere the grass on the side of a hillside burns.

These are moments that all occur - outside the moth-ridden world of our minds.  Our minds, like mad false light, to which thoughts come like the deluded bugs of summer.  Our attention is clouded and we forget that somewhere, here, all is happening, all is profound and mundane and everything we long for is already real.

Love, work, partnership, understanding, liberation.  This is all here, somewhere.  Somewhere there is no pain, only the awareness of pain.  Somewhere there is no suffering, only the awareness of suffering.  Somewhere there is no soul mate, there is no dream job, there is no lottery - there is only imagination.

Somewhere I wait until the timer on my phone plays the digital harp sound so that I may stop this writing exercise.  Somewhere - here - I wonder about the worlds within me.  Somewhere I am.  I am somewhere.  There is a jar of tea near my computer.  In another world I am drinking coffee, sweetened with coconut sugar, frothed with milk.  Somewhere (in another world) a lover passes me and kisses the top of my head, unconcerned with my greasy hair and the strangeness of my morning.  Somewhere there are babies calling for me, there is money in the bank, there is a project that takes me out of the mothy madness in my mind.  In this place I take a break, wondering if somewhere, I sit without obligation, in a tiny apartment above a garage with chickens making chicken sounds and the freedom of nowhere to be.