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.