My younger lover/best friend asked me to write about Desire.
He is evidently confounded by the fact of a 73-year-old woman who is still
juicy and loves sex. However confounded I found myself by his suggestion, I still
found the question of desire, where it comes from, how it presents itself, an
interesting one and the search for an answer rewarding.
I believe that desire is far deeper than physical urges for
sexual connection. Almost immediately upon looking inside, I found what do I
desire to be a more difficult search, and
more revealing. It’s a core issue:
What do I yearn toward? What draws me? How does following that pull reward me?
How do I experience it and how do I respond to that inner message?
So far I know that this is the same pull that leads me to
any feeding of my soul. A full engagement of all of my self in alignment brings me to a multiplicity of
criss-crossing and enlivening sensations and inclinations. At one moment it may
be to feed my body with connection, touch, food, hot water, silks, sunshine,
hiking, or sea air. At another it may be surrender to the exotic and refreshing
realm of sleep. Or my lover’s touch, a sparkle in his eye, or a suggestion will
light up my second chakra centers, making my genitals, lower belly, nipples
sing while I smile back with mischief in my eye.
All of this, while fully embodied, still reverberates with
the energy of Spirit. It becomes holy when I enter into each moment with full
attention, deep listening, and wholeheartedness. Spirit demands of me that I fully appreciate this amazing
human experience of Itself made manifest, giving back gratitude, the pleasure
of giving and receiving, and the never-ending effort to touch the Mystery.
It is this dance with the Mystery and how she flirts with
me, constantly taunting me with the hope of solving the conundrum of the Other
at the same moment as knowing myself as the Whole that I find at the heart of
my desire. It is the Mystery that keeps me juicy.
On a more mundane level, giving in to the adages of this
youth culture could well lead to giving up on desire. It takes courage to see
beyond what has been presented as beautiful and desirable through a million
advertisements and magazine advisements to what is truly beautiful and
desirable. Besides, it changes as we change, so you never really know what’s
real unless you pay very close attention. Checking inside, am I able to see a
woman with a face deeply lined with character and age, a man confined to a
wheelchair with his once-facile speech ripped aside by a stroke, as beautiful?
That is a description of what this couple, my lover and I, look like at first
glance. As it happens, I am able. But it requires living inside the surfaces, not on them.
Courage. Yes, it takes courage to keep looking past our
self-imposed borders of convention and limitation. It takes courage to remove
one’s clothes for the first time in front of a younger man at an age over
seventy. It takes courage to admit that even kissing might be difficult to
enjoy when breath is hard to manage or that getting undressed and hoisting
oneself from wheelchair to a bed without a fall is chancy. But when that
courage is rewarded with recognition of the beauty and, yes, grace of the human
soul, then I am back in the presence of the sacred. Then Desire is reborn in
me.
My true desire is to not flinch in the face of what Life
wants from me. It is to find happiness in each present moment, even the dark
ones lurking in the abyss. It is to celebrate the losses and the grief as
gifts, even when they are disguised as unimaginable difficulties. It is to open
to pleasure and to thrill to new ways to learn and to experience fully this
amazing and unimaginably short lifespan. I can hope that I will remain
relatively able-bodied, though I may not. I can hope that the difficulties of
very old age will go easy on me. But my desire is to continue to rejoice in my
dance with Mystery, on my hands and knees if necessary, however she presents
herself to me.
PART II – THE
OTHER
I was quite content with Part I above, but I knew it wasn’t
going to satisfy this lover of mine, this Other. And because I knew that, I
must have already known there was more. But it took his nudge to go this extra
mile. That’s how a great connection with the Other works: it brings one the
gift of a new perspective; and, when it’s really good, one can’t get away with
much.
I awoke well before dawn this morning, needing more sleep
but unable to shake the growing knowledge that to get inside that more, I needed to pleasure myself, watching very carefully
what came into focus. I have an odd relationship to masturbation in that I
didn’t discover it for myself. Perhaps it was sharing a bedroom with sisters.
But an early marriage at seventeen introduced me to the pleasures of sex, and I
took right to it. It’s been said that one’s early sexual experiences can form
the basis for one’s life-long appetites. Perhaps. If so, it would be the
presence of an Other that formed mine. Masturbation always seemed flat to me, a
bit mechanistic. Where was the surprise, the not-knowing of what would come,
what new sensation or transcendent moment might next appear?
This morning was no different in many respects. I didn’t
feel desire for the sexual but for the information, so I had to rev myself up
with a bit of oil and … it wasn’t until I allowed my Other and our recent
sexual activities to flash through my brain that I began to feel the thrill
sensations that made my juices flow. Aha. I didn’t continue fantasizing, but
tried to follow the energy. Again, it became mechanistic. I came, it felt good,
brought a feeling of body wellbeing, but it was flat. However, something else
dawned in me. Life shook me — hard.
New life is created by connection between Others — from
microscopic entities to complex humans. When inbreeding occurs, things begin to
go wrong. When a marriage becomes perfunctory, it goes stale. The magic
disappears when one allows oneself to be subsumed or recreated by another. It’s
a tricky thing, because my relationships bloom when I give access to myself, but it will wear out if I merge with my lover, if I
allow him to form me into an extension of himself. There is the paradox; there
is where I touch the Mystery: by staying Other while also giving wholly.
Life wants us to cross-pollinate. If I bring my partner new
glimpses into what he is not, and if he
brings me insight into both what I am and what I am not, then we
are both going to stay juicy. If we get complacent and refuse to recognize the
Third Body* in our relationship, i.e., Life or The Mystery, and the role the
Other has in bringing us to bump up against it, then we’re likely to grow
apart, seek outside the relationship for what it no longer brings us. If I
refuse to open and engage, I will lose my juice. This engagement does not have
to be sexual; that happens to be an important avenue for me, but it does need
to be with the Other. That Other can be inside myself, or outside, but I must
engage it as wholeheartedly as I can if I want to make the most of this extraordinary
human lifetime.
Why else does every list of what makes a happy, long-lived
old person include social connection? Life is telling us something. We need
each other; we need one another’s difference from ourselves; we need to engage with and learn to love difference
itself. Life depends on us to do so. The alternative is obliteration through
decline, withering, drying up, extinction.
So, what I learned today as I read this back is that this
learning itself is making my desire rise. I’m feeling that general rosy sense
of good health, twittering nipples and live genitals, warm belly, and euphoria
in my head and breast. Life, the Mystery, is rewarding me for making connection
with something that had been Other until now and now is part of me.
Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.
* “The Third Body”, poem by Robert Bly
