Last week in my poetry class (the absolute BEST thing I have
going on in my life right now) my friend from church mentioned having helped
get the congregation’s Maypole ready and I had such a deep, yowly pang for the
Sparkly Festival and all that it means. I almost said the heck with it and
bought a day pass, even though I am recovering from acute stress and therefore
avoiding all things overstimulating.
I didn’t go, but the longing seemed like a good, healing
sign, and the nostalgia got me wondering just where sexiness fits into my life
nowadays. For a while, it didn’t figure in at all. The stress of teaching at a
harsh school had me wishing for as much shelter, as much covering up as
possible. The parts of me that were vulnerable—poetry, compassion, art, sex,
retreated inward for safety as I went into survival mode. It was easy to
welcome back the less complicated aspects of creativity, to write and draw and
paint up a storm—in fact, it’s the only way to heal I’ve ever known. But sex is
harder to let back in, especially since it’s hard to see where I stand in
relation to it.
In the time since I was last blogging regularly, I’ve done
one thing exactly right—I moved into a dream apartment in the most woodsy,
flowery neighborhood in the city. Gold Star Wing Girl says it’s like I live in
a cupcake, and I have a back terrace that’s so private it may as well be
another room. Saturday was so perfect, the sun so warm and the air so
lilac-scented, it seemed like a good place to see where I was with my old
friend, nudism. Only the cats would be able to see me, and they were too busy
sunning themselves and chasing flies to care.
The vine covered walls and perfect square of blue May
cartoon sky were so encouraging. I changed into my pink fuzzy robe, sat down in
my cute turquoise Adirondack chair, and gave some naked Saturday-afternoon
reading a try.
I can’t imagine why it felt bad, certainly nothing bad
happened—what even COULD have? My heart raced in an unpleasant way and I had clothes
back on in minutes. Such a harmless, pleasant idea cast the day in this weird
darkness, which luckily I could walk off in the gorgeous neighboring woods.
(Maybe I’ve at least made my home a little more Festival-like, now that I think
of it.)
Experienced and self-aware as I’ve managed to become, I’m
vexingly at a loss as to how to express my sexy side. Sometimes it feels as
though the trauma work I did last year took away more than it gave, or maybe
it’s the trauma OF work still sticking with me and wanting me to pile on the
shelter. I don’t know.
Today at church, we were doing the rites of spring, and the
minister was shyly wading through the bawdier aspects of Beltane. The friends I
was sitting with joined me in emphatic applause each time he mentioned the
sexytimes rites of spring, as he, in his own very much clothed way, admitted
that the world NEEDS naked shenanigans. (If I haven’t mentioned it lately,
Unitarians are awesome.) So I know from the forcefulness of my applause that I
am still aligned with wanting to romp naked in a field, I just can’t seem to
want to do it.
As I’ve been working to convert the blog into a book, I’ve
had to fight the feeling that the story doesn’t belong to me anymore, or I
don’t belong to it. I struggle to feel entitled to it because I ended up
writing it as an outsider. I wanted so much to serve you, but by the end (and
I’m remembering that this was the point of the story in the first place) I
could only end up serving myself. My somewhat disappointingly boring self.
The way the sermon ended felt oddly personal to me. Inspired
by the Song of Songs, the minister gave us the go ahead to spout whatever love
we had—“If it’s flowery, if it’s corny, that probably means it’s good.” He said
there is a time to leave one’s love-nest behind and go out into the world and
convert the love into other kinds of goodness.
On the way home from church, I felt lonely, maybe because my
brunch pals aren’t around this week, but maybe lonely for the parts of myself I
can’t currently access or express. I have such a deep love for my adventures. I
miss them like camp friends who rarely keep in touch, but who save me and
influence me and cross my mind all the time. I’ve felt little slivers of my
sexual self coming back, and I’m curious and impatient to see what form it will
take. All I know to do is write the book, so I don’t think I have any choice.