A Prejudice Against Leaders by Lucky

A tension is running through me. It seems to make a sound. That sound is growing louder. It is making me uncomfortable and anxious. I want to write about it, to explore what it is, but I feel more nervous as I get closer to it. That is usually a sign of how much ambivalence I feel. I know the tension says something about me, and I’m not sure I want to find out what. I am really nervous about letting this part of my experience be seen. I will go ahead, because I am that kind of fool, but I do so knowing that I have mixed feelings about what I am looking at. I am aware of how much prejudice against leadership I feel, and I am becoming aware of what that says about me.

It is deep in my bones. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.  I grew up, in some ways, as one who learned to rely on myself. Some of my beauty is related to how much responsibility I have taken for myself. I like who I have become. All of this is true. It is only recently that I finally, after years of misdirection and suffering, came into my own. I have learned how to take care of myself. Now, I’m looking at how this hard won achievement is incomplete. I don’t want to relinquish and bow down to anyone. In so doing, I am seeing, I am unwilling to take responsibility for my deeply human partialness.

I want to be free of leaders, teachers, therapists, parents and would-be priests. I don’t want anyone standing between me, and the Great Mystery. I don’t like feeling small, undeveloped, inadequate, or somehow stupid and blind. When anyone has the audacity to presume they know or experience something more thoroughly than I, I usually don’t believe them, don’t trust them, and quickly dismiss them. I do kill them, but non-violently. They are still dead to me.

All of this, the indiscriminant killing, is my way of protecting myself against the unscrupulous charlatans out there, who would prey on my desire to be fully human. No body is going to take advantage of my developmental desire, my longing for wholeness. No more, will I hope that others will lead me to where I know I need to go. I know that is the only way one can go.

Oh but, I’m weary. So tired that I’m vulnerable. So tired that I make mistakes So tired that sometimes I wish there were someone else who could help me carry my desire a step further. But, if anyone comes close and offers in any way, I am deeply suspicious. They better be careful.  I am likely to turn on them. I want a teacher but he, or she, better not try to teach me anything. On the other hand, what good is a teacher who doesn’t? The truth is, I’m not very tolerant of either. I want to be fed, but primarily, only in my way.

I know this is true about me. I don’t like admitting it. I am so unenlightened, so human, so ordinary. I only admit it now to myself because I want to deal better with the prejudice I face each time I care enough to try to take on a leadership role. I’m also tired of being shot at, disparaged, reduced and otherwise mistreated. Trying to make a difference, and caring about those around me, is only partly vain, sometimes it is genuine. I can be human in that way too. But, I’m often wary of it.  I don’t like being the object of suspicion.

I know I have no real right to assume any role of leadership as long as I harbor the will to disregard others who are genuinely trying to help me along the way. I know I have no right to complain about being shot at as long as I hold a gun in my hand. I know I don’t handle it well, being the object of suspicion. It is precisely because I haven’t given up protecting myself in this way. I don’t want to go on and become the caring elder. Or, the leader, I could be. I am torn open. When it means letting go of protecting myself in this old way. Can I let myself learn from, rely upon, and trust an other?

I don’t have any say about the prejudice against leadership in the world. I will just have to learn to deal with it. I know I can start dealing with it better, if I am willing to begin right here in my heart. If I am on a course that will carry me ultimately into a real elderhood then I’ve got to trust myself enough that I won’t kill off the food bearers who are trying to help me along the way. Also, I know, I can’t really become one of them until I can admit their existence into my heart.

The journey toward elderhood has so many twists and turns to it. I keep meeting myself on this road. Strangely, I come in many forms yet I still have to deal with the same old one — me — if I’m going to make further progress along the way.

I notice too, that alongside the baggage of my old ways, the self I know, is a stranger, laughing, and accompanying me. I hope you are noticing something like him, or her, too.

What Makes A Difference? by Lucky

I’ve been dwelling with this question for a while.  Like any good, real, question it is taking me for a ride. What makes a difference?

Before I get into my response to this compelling question, I just want to extoll the value of a good question.  A really good question, such as this one, doesn’t have one right answer, and doesn’t lend itself to simplicity. In addition to asking one to reflect on a specific something, it asks one to let in the complex, incredible diversity of this world. That is what I hope to do, as I let this question lead me deeper and deeper into mystery.

My response to this question has been one that has unfolded. The question is still resonating within me. It is still provoking my awareness. Level-by-level I am discovering that I have very little reason to believe that I have any kind of response that makes the question go away. I am being skewered (changing one could say, the question itself is making a difference) by the uncertainty it is raising in me.

Initially, I thought this was a fairly easy question for me to address. I have been vocal and consistent advocate for community. On some level I know I believe that caring and real connection make a big difference. I have spent a good part of my life trying to restore the natural social habitat of our species. I really believe that our social nature, which runs wild in our feelings, is an endangered life form. I have spent, and probably will spend, the bulk of my life-energy working on behalf of this perception. I could compellingly argue about the importance of this issue. I have good reason to believe that community has big implications for our complex consciousness, our sense of belonging, and our future.

Therefore, you can imagine my surprise, when this question led me to a deeper more fundamental and miraculous realization. It was a week after I thought I laid the question to rest. I was satisfied with what I believed, and my efforts toward that end. Suddenly, I became aware that it wasn’t given to me, as a human being, to know what made a difference. I really didn’t know what made a difference. This was devastation to the part of me that was invested in community (in my own knowing). Miraculously, even with the loss of my precious illusion (and I could feel it/me dissolving), I experienced joy and awe.

‘Not knowing’ freed me. In ways I am still discovering. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the miraculousness of not knowing what makes a difference. Where I think I might feel bereft, I am discovering the warm pleasure of coming to my limitations. The fundamental paradox that everything makes a difference and nothing makes a difference places me in a wonderful position. I can’t not try, nor can I necessarily make a difference. Instead of being disheartened by my own ineffectuality, I am instead graced to know that I alone am not responsible for change.

All I can do is ‘show up.’ That alone is not enough. Something more happens, if change occurs, it is something I can’t make happen. My presence, and the energy I put into making a difference, add up to increased probability, but they are not decisive.

Or, things might change for reasons I cannot fathom. I don’t even get to be aware of all of it, there is no intention on my part. What makes a difference then?  There must be some other kind of ripeness to change. Things happen, I don’t know why. Maybe I am an ingredient of that change, but I am completely oblivious of it. I make a difference (or, do I?) without knowledge or effort. I don’t notice, or know. Shit happens.

I like arriving at this realization. It lets some of me off the hook (of responsibility) and strangely puts other parts of me more firmly on the hook. What do I mean? I am not sure yet. Play with this question a while and see what it does for you. For me, it relieves me of thinking I am that important. Apparently, I’m not. At the same time I am sometimes.

This floors me. I don’t get to know when I matter. Thus, I want to show up for everything —  I might be a necessary ingredient.

‘Not knowing’ seems to make me a more effective advocate for making a difference.

I’m savvy enough to know that when I think I know, I probably don’t. Now, thanks to this question, I am learning that ‘not knowing’ is probably the best way to advocate for change. What is ripe for real change is most likely beyond me, and my efforts. Change, therefore, is safe from me, and more likely to be change for change’s sake. Then, how I respond is how I aid change.

Making a difference is, and is not, up to me. Instead of that disappointing news discouraging me, I feel freed, and less distorted by my own shortcomings. Change happens, Lord knows how or why. I want to believe it can be directed. That some law of the Universe applies. Knowing that making a difference is to some extent my doing, and knowing that it is not, somehow ties me more firmly into the mystery of it all.

Precocious by Lucky

I used to joke, about being an elder. “Chronologically I’m an infant elder, but experientially I’m precocious.” I still say it sometimes, because it still feels true. But now, when I say it, I’m not joking, and I’m not exactly sure how I feel about being this way. I looked up the word precocious to see what it meant, and if I was using the word right. The word refers to someone who is “ahead of their time.” I don’t know how this applies to a senior citizen, but it does seem like there is a way that I seem to be ahead of my own development. I don’t actually know how to write, or even think about that, but I feel like I have to try. I don’t exactly know why. I tend to think it is presumptuous. It seems to me to be more than a little precocious to write about being precocious.

Officially someone who is precocious is supposed to be more developed than their age. I guess that is true of me. I don’t think it is something I sought out, or feel like I can take any credit for. Somehow the Great Mystery deemed that I had to go through a long period of being perched on death’s doorstep, so I could be brought back, through no efforts I was capable of, with a form of consciousness that reminds me daily how powerless I am in life. If I am really in any way precocious it is because I know this life is not my life, but Life’s life. That isn’t the kind of knowing anyone seeks, especially if it means being held close to death.

I sometimes think being precocious, in the way I seem to be, is a gift. I get to feel a lot of things. Sometimes I can make this awareness useful. I get inspired and just feel awe. At other times I think of this awareness as a curse. I have to feel things I would rather not. I can’t always make useful what besieges me. I feel happy when I am able to serve my community through this awareness. At other times I just feel grief, because I know no way to digest, and make palatable, what assails me. I alternately feel deeply embedded in the whole, and desperately alone, and drowning in an immense emptiness.  So far, it looks like both are real, they seem to coexist, and I have to travel through them.

Being precocious is not my doing. I know it. Life made me this way. I remember telling the doctor I had at Stanford, that I always wanted to be special, but when he told me that they (the doctors) had never seen a condition like mine, and didn’t know how to treat me, then I realized I was special in away I had never anticipated. I feel the same way now. I am precocious not the way I want, but in some way that Life wants.

I am simultaneously thrilled to be called in this way and horrified that it means in some way that I am a freak — a freak of nature. Being disabled is freakish enough, but being strangely enabled is really freaky. I am not writing these words, doing this exploration, to complain.  I’m doing it to genuinely wonder what my being is doing here, how does it serve that I am like this? I fear that I am a freak, some natural anomaly, but secretly I think that actually I am the exception that proves the point. I believe the feelings that assail me, feelings of incredible connection, are part of what it means to be fully human. I believe that a kind of emotional intelligence about ourselves, and each other, is part of our natural inheritance. I think I am twisted in this way to serve to remind us all of this aspect of who we are. In that sense, I’m not an anomaly, only a reminder.

Precociousness then is a memory aid. For a time, some people have forgotten what they are capable of.  The arc of human development includes an emotional awareness of the fact that we exist because something, something big and mysterious, has employed Life to make sure we exist. I’m grateful that I get to know this much, I tend to think the crazy reality we live in has lulled us to sleep, to fearfully forget what we already know.

I don’t know what anyone’s purpose is for being here. But, I do know that there is a purpose —a scouting mission to the edge — and that each life is precious, because that mystery is embedded in it. Being precocious is a tolerable inconvenience compared to that kind of awareness.

I founder, in a very human way, under the weight of what is being asked of me. I live in constant admiration of how others have shouldered their own weights, and I take hope that I can handle mine, because others let me see what they struggle with. If I am precocious its only to remind us all that we have passed this way before —it is within us, to know why we are here.

Social Coercion

A friend of mine, a co-host on our radio show, had no more than uttered these words “social coercion”, when the part of me that is looking for possible Slow Lane material started up. I don’t know exactly why these words agitated me so. I’m hoping to find out as I reflect upon what got stirred within me. All I know for sure is that I could smell something that was more complex than it seemed. I think I gravitated to it much like the salmon is drawn back to its spawning place.

Social coercion. That sounds so much like being bullied by the masses. I guess for some it is. It implies that actions are the result of others. This is an anti-democratic nightmare. Somebody manipulates others to have their will. It is no wonder that groups are not trustworthy. The social arena is full of this harmful possibility. People worry because social coercion is everywhere; from advertising, political spin, religious proselytizing and all forms of fixing, healing and converting. The world of social connection is full of it. 

There is a necessary evil that haunts us as a social animal (social coercion), so much so that I think we would rather demonize it than learn to deal with it. In other words, social coercion is a natural phenomenon in a world of connection. Throwing it out, or acting surprised and intolerant of it, would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don’t think my friend was doing anything like this when he mentioned social coercion, but my antenna went wild, because we live in such a fragmented culture, and there is so much distrust around, that I could believe someone might argue that if we could put an end to social coercion we might have a saner more humane world.

As you probably can tell, I think social coercion is one form of that which binds each of us to the other. Relationship necessarily involves enough pushing and shoving so that all parties can learn, if they want to, how to take care of themselves. Relationship, if it is the real deal, involves realities colliding; a certain amount of jousting to find out what is possible. If coercion, taking one’s own position and advocating for it, was looked at a path to social hell, then we as a species would be so cut-off, and so isolated that we could no longer consider ourselves to be social animals.

Maybe this isn’t common knowledge, or it isn’t something people actually grasp, but each of us lives in a bubble we call reality. This bubble is composed of everything we see and believe in. The world we live in is partially composed of the bubble (worldview) we apply to it. From the world we create with our bubbles comes our sense of self. The science of human development reveals that maturation involves giving up one bubble (the partial worldview), and sense of self you have, for a more complex, more complete bubble (another less-partial worldview), and a more capable, functional self. The great spiritual practices are based upon the same recognition. Reality becomes more real, more as it is, as we give up our insistences that it conform to our constructs. Life, more or less, coerces us out of blindness into the light.

People give up their bubbles for various reasons, sometimes it’s voluntary, sometimes it’s not. In the meantime all of these bubbles coexist and press on each other. Social reality is made up of multiple coexisting bubbles, upon which, there are also multiple identities — selves trying to live up to their worldviews. To be true to oneself in this kind of tumultuous free for all social space is hard. And, this hardship, plus exposure to all of these partial worldviews, is just what humans need to grow and become what they are capable of being. The tumult, including what can be considered social coercion, tempers us, and confers upon us the choices we must make to become ourselves.

Social coercion is a complex phenomenon. I’d like to do away with some forms of it (for example gang or fraternity hazing rites) but I’m concerned that that would weaken our social immune system and leave us even more vulnerable to toxic worldviews. I think that social coercion begs not to be stopped, but to be out grown. The more solid I am, the more confident I am in my own worldview (bubble), the less I worry about coercion. Paradoxically, this strength or confidence, comes from regularly and completely rubbing shoulders with this sea of others who hold differing viewpoints. The most useful response to social coercion is through exposure to social coercion.

I am more worried about the impulse to limit the pressures of social coercion, than I am concerned about social coercion. I know a lot of damage has been done, especially to voiceless minorities, but I don’t want us (humanity) to denature ourselves (each other) rather than grow ourselves. Social coercion is the water we learn to be ourselves in; it is the complex environment that coaxes out of us our own nuances.

While I’m dwelling on this topic I just have to say that one of the most basic and virulent forms of social coercion is the misuse of the word “we.” We is a powerful word. It can refer to the existence of the collective, the community of connection, that always exists, or it can be used as the worst form of inclusiveness that paradoxically excludes differences. “We” has been a generalization that has led to genocide, slavery and many forms of extreme prejudice. It behooves us all to pay attention to how the word is used by each of us. It is an indicator of what kind of bubble any of us lives in.

I think it better not to think so much in terms of social coercion, but to think more in terms of social diversity. 

Admiration by Lucky

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a circle contemplating an upcoming meeting with some young people. An elder in the circle commented that our job as elders had to include admiring the young. In addition to helping me better prepare for meeting this young couple, these words, started me thinking.  My thoughts have, as they always do, run toward community. It occurred to me that everyone needs to be admired, and that admiration could be one of the greatest gifts we can give to each other. These thoughts unlocked a door for me, and they are taking me into a new relationship with myself, and others. I hope, with these words, to share a little of that with you.

Not long ago I had an experience I didn’t know how to talk about. I found myself in a room full of dying people. These people didn’t have obvious illnesses, or even much real-time awareness of dying, but they all were on the same trajectory towards death. I was vividly aware that each was a dying human, that each was passing very quickly, and that I couldn’t do much about it. I felt vulnerable, helpless and strangely touched. As long as that moment lasted I could feel my love and appreciation for the uniqueness of each of them. I knew how grateful I was to be exposed to them.

The vividness with which I experienced the impending deaths of my friends has brought each of their qualities into my awareness. Noticing how quickly we are all passing has delivered me to a realization of how precious and unique each of us is. I more directly experienced the passion and heartache that underlies each life, and I could appreciate the personal, heroic struggle of each, as they chose to be human in their own way. I could feel how enriched my life is because each of them touched me, on their way into the mysterious darkness of death. I found myself smitten by the magnitude of our humble lives, awed and grateful, enlivened and trembling.

I couldn’t talk about the vividness of this experience, because it left me too raw, and too uncertain about speaking to the dying about dying. I still feel shaken about entering the land of the dying. I am noticing, while I am here, that I appreciate more the efforts that many are making to be as alive as possible as they pass from this earth. I am drawn to those who have been beaten, and are still magnificent, they give their life-energy fully, and they hearten me. I am filled with real, not manufactured, admiration.

I have been dwelling with this new, death-aided, admiration, since I have been initiated into the world of the dying. Paradoxically, I feel more alive, connected, and appreciative. I don’t take my friends for granted any more; they have become miracles I am blessed to be around. Each of them reveals to me something of the courage that being human requires. Each of them reminds me of how much profusion and diversity is in Creation.

Along with a more vivid relationship with the actuality of death has come a greater admiration for the living. And, this has lead to a greater desire on my part to let my fellow community members know how precious they are to me, and how well I see them. It seems to me, that perhaps the greatest gift I can give to another human being is to show them how well they are seen and appreciated. Community bonds grow with such acknowledgement

I have wondered how I might best serve my community. Now, I think I know. If I can fully live in the land of the dying, I can feel the courage and passion that goes into living out the part of Creation that is an expression of our vulnerable existence. I benefit by knowing the truth of this life: that it ends, and I get to see the utterly human way most of us deal with that truth. Some people, notably the people in my elder community, engage me and introduce me to a form of authenticity that gives me hope for life. I admire that, and I want to be around them, as we struggle to be true to the nature that endowed us with this precious chance.

I know I have wanted to be seen my entire life. The loneliness I feel so deep in my body is a product of that longing. There is no such thing as coming home, for me, without some sense of being known. This is the kind of sustaining food that I crave — being known, not as a therapist, community-builder, lover of art, music, poetry, men and women, but as a holy mystery, a part of the greater whole that lives through us. I crave the puppy pile of sharing recognition of this deeply mysterious existence. Admiring others, knowing them as they pass through, and bravely try to shape this existence, is such a gift, one that goes both ways, one that makes Life all that much more a miracle.

I’m glad I get to share it with you. And, I admire how you have done it.

l/d

Gratitude for Darkness — by Lucky

“Darkness is the light most feared.”

The Solstice season is upon us. This is the time when one traditionally celebrates the return of the light. Each year we live through the darkest part of the year and focus most of our joy and gratitude upon the celestial turning that returns to us beginnings and new light. This is the season of the Christmas story, Kwanzaa, Hannukah, and the New Year. We, collectively, celebrate and honor the light that shows up in the darkest hour.

This year, perhaps perversely, I find myself thinking about my gratitude for darkness. I am well aware that what I am — some strange and contradictory combination of brokenness and wholeness — is a product, not of light, but, of darkness. I wheel around aware that I had to be dragged into hellish darkness to be forged into a new man — a lesser and paradoxically more capable being. It turns out that the Abyss is part of my parentage.

I used to think of myself as a kind of diplomat, an emissary from the realm of the needy. I was one who never hesitated to say that asking for help was one of the most community building things one could do. I was skewed enough to contradict the Bible and say that it actually is more blessed to need (to ask and receive) than to give. Now, however, I’ve come to see that I am really the ambassador of darkness. I came out of a place so dark that I never want to go back there, but all of my gifts of awareness were given to me there, and I have come to believe it is the darkness that gives Life.

I don’t have a Christmas tree, colored lights, or even candles, but I do have three wise men. They are all that remains of a once mainstream Christian life. They have stuck with me, and accompanied me during my lonely, sometimes solitudinal, dark vigils. I’ve come to see them differently, not just as heroes that persevered through the desert following a star, but as actual kings of the darkness, who have shown-up to pay homage to what the darkness has wrought. The star of Bethlehem is to me a product of the dark mystery surrounding it.

When I first had my stroke, and had to wait for declining year after declining year to find out if I would live, I used to curse the darkness of Creation. I was confused by the painfulness uncertainty of my life. I didn’t know then what I do now. I was being re-worked, re-made. In an invisible studio I was fitted with an awareness that could only come from suffering and helplessness. The hands that held and re-shaped me were not only invisible and non-palpable, they were stained with darkness, so deep and merciful that I could not imagine it.

Today, I have the pleasure of knowing many elders, old people who have known dark times – the sometimes painful, uncertain, and seemingly unending periods (where there is no human solace deep enough to last) — create compassionate understanding and real character. The darkness of Life, if it doesn’t kill one, confers a depth of humanity that cannot be attained any other way. In fact, darkness is the birthplace of depth. Hidden in the shadows is a dark gem, not one anyone can grasp, but one that sometimes grasps us. The broken body, job, relationship, or lifestyle, is a terrible well-spring that unleashes hard-won wisdom into the world.

I don’t really know how to be thankful for such a demanding and seemingly arbitrary fruitfulness. I feel hugely ambivalent about even harboring this awareness. I know I have much to give thanks for, that some angel must have had to endure a lot to give me a chance to write these words, but I would not wish this experience upon anyone. The darkness is just too exacting.

Still, here in the traumatized aftermath, I am thankful! I don’t really know how to express it, I don’t know how to honestly honor the unimaginable, but I know I owe this part of what is good about my life, to that which perched and feed upon me long enough that I became a being capable of being grateful for darkness. To me, this is the real gift of the season, one that in this dark-age offers a great deal.

In the end, I guess I write these words to remember what darkness has granted me, and to remind everyone that light sometimes shows up as darkness.

DESIRE IN AN AGING WOMAN —Alexandra Hart

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