Gifts of Love

All through the mid of January I threw myself into designing a bittersweetsweet workshop. Fusing my two great loves in the world of wellbeing; the female and the aromatic. I had a two-hour window to perform a conjuring of living, breathing, healing sensuality, and I meant to make the most of every second. Figured it would mostly attract women in the night of winter, curled up inside woolen selves, missing sunshine and skin. Well, figured there'd be more like me out there. And I'm speaking now from the other side, from 4 weeks of steeping myself in sandalwood and jasmine at night, brewing honey into syrup with roses, vanilla, sweet wicked damiana by day. And remembering that, while it's our roots that place us deep in the world (like our crowns keep us hooked into the inspiration of the cosmos), it's that second chakra that keeps us solid in the world of the human (just as that third eye translates celestial inspiration into every day's insight.)

Which is certainly not to equate being a woman immersed in aromatic medicine with some kind of ambulatory womb, but is to say; if this life is about being in this body, and the thing that differentiates this body from others is skin and sensation and a particular sweetness of anatomy -- okay.

So I took all the time I might have to look outwards to perfect recipes and stretch the variations, to make little altars every day to the idea and flavors of intimacy in friendship, solitude, fantasy and memory. And it's good I think that I've been alone in this room, on these sharp winter days, to do this magic. It's gotten a little tangled, a little humid, like a dense sponge quietly living. The other, meatier side of solitude. Not the windy, heady heady satisfaction of the single mind, focused at leisure on a single point. More the deep silk and quicksand sensorium of this singular body, and the participatory insight of physical being. More incorporation, more direct experience, more living in nouns.

St. Valentine's, Modern Day of Consensual Acknowlegement that Love is a Powerful Thing We All Thrive Within, is my second-favorite holiday. I have not, for many many years, passed it without an Other to shower with all the gold of my imagination. I wrestled with that while I infused, composed and created the little labors of love with which others with shower their Others this year. And it's good now. Open hands, steady feet. And this wide gold mirror before me.

I can start a thousand sentences this way

In the desert I ate sun. I drank all my water and the water passed through me. I breathed the sky into and out from my lungs. I swallowed sunset and sunrise. I tasted the red stone and the black stone. I was nourished by my dreams and the dreams of the land. But I only ate sun.

In the desert I talked to everything. The birds that flitted through dawn, the cactus of morning, the lizards of afternoon, the spiders of sunset, the drums in the dark. By the last day I was singing to everything.

In the desert I could not erase my own evidence, my cells are there still.

In the desert it is easy to go downhill, to follow the easy way, the water's way, coyote's way. Uphill is a mountain, where flood and night come from, where mystery lives. I made my home at the foot of a red cliff, and every day went downhill, so I could come back uphill.

In the desert, very small lizards run up to you with giddy abandon, so happy to see you! It takes them a few seconds, by your foot, to realize how big you are. And then they run away!

In the desert, color is profound. A whole day can fill up with slate and gray and taupe and dun, and then! Bright pink shards of bone wreathing a contented barrel cactus.

In the desert I was grateful to have a meditation practice, a space within large enough to hold the space around me. A sky big enough to fill the sky.

In the desert, sometimes, there is no sound. Sometimes I found myself breathing so carefully I could barely hear myself. Once, I woke myself up with the sound of my heartbeat.

In the desert I slept with nothing over my head but the purple sky filled with diamonds.

In the desert the fractal geometry of nature is more apparent than in the forest, and the same truths are expressed no matter where you focus your eyes.

In the desert everything you talk to, talks back.

Incorporation - Bringing Into the Body

Today is the first time since returning home that I've been able to go, alone, into the land, into the woods, and be.

To think about where I am, today, and where this new year might take me. To think about where I've been, and how to bring that inside me. In the desert we spoke of this, of incorporation, of digesting the lessons and the learning, of the slow unstoppable seep of growth. I kept the walkabout sun shining on my skin and in front of my eyes for two months, carried floating, glad and full. Now my sunny skin is fading, and my eyes are full of the simple white of winter, and I am learning to wear this sun within.

This is a thing I know: I will be comfortable in any house. With a bus pass and a water bottle I am confident in any city. With a backpack and any vehicle I will find adventure. And when I step outside all these, into air and rock and the fragrant living world, I am free.