Love lost, love found

November already! Wow. It has been a year since I left Portland for San Francisco. And while I miss my friends, and the life I had up there, I have no regrets. I love being near my family and friends here, and I'd be a fool to complain about living in San Francisco, now wouldn't I?

Halloween would have been Tammy's 40th birthday. This one was a big contrast to the one last year, when I had a friend visiting from Denmark and after showing him around town I curled up in bed and cried. This year I poured a drink and imagined the party she would have had for herself at her nightclub. I imagined her shaking that wonderful ass of hers on the dance floor, her blond hair shining in the darkness. Bittersweet, and no tears this time. Time does heal... I can think of her without tears falling, though they still well up in my eyes now and then.

A friend of mine sent me a "Firsts Meme" on Facebook, and as I completed it, I dredged up old memories of my first best friend and my first kiss and my first love. I thought about the boy I first kissed, when I was 7 or 8, and who I did not see again for 8 years but became my first love, and certainly the only boy I loved when I was a teen. My childhood sweetheart. Everything was so sweet. I loved him. I always have. I never quite understood how things dissolved between us. So as I was filling out that meme, I looked up his name on Facebook. There are lots of people with his name, but only he has his face. It is the same face. And so I sent him a message.

Minutes later he responded and then we were chatting away, filling each other in on our lives. And within minutes we both had answers to the questions that had gone unanswered for over 20 years. Parents. Our parents had thwarted us. My dad called his mom and told her I was 'late'. She in turn told him. He never heard anything again, so he thought I'd had an abortion. Lots of pain and sadness and feeling stupid on both our parts. And so it goes with teens. Our parents have stayed in touch all these years, and despite both of us asking our parents about each other, they never, in all these years, provided us the means to get in touch with each other. He's known for years that I was in Oregon, and tried to find me. It wasn't until I left Oregon that my father told me he was there. Funny that. And Hooray for Facebook!

And now, back to work. I've got a podcast to release tomorrow, and a naughty story to finish.

Sitting here in the little courtyard, the sky is incredibly blue and the sun warm, but the trees are losing their leaves anyway. M was just leaning his head in my lap, and I rubbed his neck and forehead, mussing up his hair just before he has to go off to a meeting. The days are so much shorter now. I think I'll go to Ocean Beach tomorrow. I want to crunch sand between my toes. I want to taste the wind with my skin.

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Gratitude

(Thank you PS for the gift of your breast.)

Tears blur my vision, dripping onto the keyboard. My heart is filled with Gratitude. So much Gratitude for so much Love in my life.

Two years ago I created for myself the possibility of being fully self-expressed. And as I manifested that in my life, I found myself struggling with freedom, with feeling truly free to be myself, to be whatever I wanted to be. And then something happened. I had a breakthrough in 'being' and found that I was free to fully express myself as Love. Mahatma Gandhi once said, "be the change you want to see in the world." And this freedom to be the change I want to see in the world, to Be Love, has enriched my life and the lives of those I touch, and the lives they touch. It is a wonderful thing, to know love and to be love, and to feel its presence in my life when it comes back to me, manifold.

In my heart there is sadness and longing and anticipation and joy and... so many things simple and complex. But gratitude and love are foremost. It seems that every day I've been in Portland this year, an extraordinary person has come into my life. And there has been such a sense of urgency to bond with these people, to make that connection that will withstand distance. I'm trying not to mourn the loss of easy access to my friends new and old. At times I am more successful than others, but I am comforted by experience: I know I can maintain deep and meaningful relationships over long distances. And I do plan to come back to Portland often. The sense of community here is so amazing. There is so much going on, so many people committed to doing good things, great things. People committed to helping others and growing and being and sharing and co-creating a livable world.

The pain and loss this year have broken me open in a way that I always feared. These feelings are at times so intense that I find myself unable to breathe, unable to stop the tears. This is what love feels like--the other side we don't want to think about--the side that keeps many of us from being open to love, and to Life. Everything superfluous and unreal, every barrier and mask and inauthenticity was burned away from me and I am standing naked to the world, exposed, pink and new and vulnerable and terrified and people have responded with unanticipated love and tenderness and kindness. Who knew there was so much lovingkindness in the world?

It has been a whirlwind week. Work during the days, play during the evenings, repeat as necessary to satisfy myself and my friends. I have hugged, kissed, nuzzled, danced, wined and dined, tried butter shots, licked chocolate off of body parts, slept snuggled up to a wonderfully curvacious bottom, wandered the halls of a hotel during Orycon in my pajamas, enjoyed an impromptu cleavage convention, watched lap dances, fire dances, and asses dancing under floggers. And that's just the PG to R-rated stuff ;)

And as it hits home that I am leaving this wonderfully expressive, connected, touch-positive community this week, I know gratitude, and love, and grief. But my world is not ending. I am embracing what life brings next, and I will carry this community in my heart and mind, and I will create it anywhere I go, because I am Love.

Kahlil Gibran wrote:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your
understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the
sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life,
your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always
accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Winter is coming, and soon the Spring. I will sow the seeds of a new life in a new place and find joy in discovering what grows out of my efforts. Thank you, my friends, for letting me love you. And thank you, so very much, for returning it ten-fold and more. Truly, I am blessed.

Being sad

She looks at me from her frame, an antique art-deco frame, her head slightly tilted, her blonde hair tossed by the wind. At home, I can see her from my bed, and at work, from my desk. She is my hero and my reminder that life is too short and must be lived fully. She would have been 39 this year, on Halloween.

I miss her so much I ache with it, and tears make typing difficult. 9 months since Tammy died. I feel like some part of me is missing, something important, something I've got to find, to remember, to bring with me, to... something. I've been parturient with grief and now I feel it rising in me, seeking exit from my body. I've never given birth. I wonder, is it like this?

I feel sometimes like I've got to live the rest of my life and hers. She was fearful and fearless. She had huge courage and she accomplished great things and I feel I can do no less in honour of her memory. I think of her and smile. I remember her smile, that little girl's shy smile, and her way of laughing that made people feel included. I remember that day at Cannon Beach, the day I snapped that photo. I can close my eyes and smell the air. I can hear the birds, feel the chill in the wind and the sand in my shoes. I remember how thin she was, how little she ate, how easily she tired. And I remember how she had such enthusiasm. She was on fire. She wanted to live and go and do. But she never really learned how to 'be', my sister.

I remember her as a child, napping in the hammock under a pine tree my grandparents planted the year my mother was born. I can smell the scent that the redwood forest has, the scent that permeated my childhood summers. I remember the wind rocking the child in that hammock, and the way her hair stuck out in all directions and her mouth fell open just a bit as she slept. I remember the way her skin smelled of Ivory soap, and how her hair smelled of Breck creme rinse, and how her hands were always dirty. Tammy was never afraid to get her hands dirty.

And I miss her so much I ache with it. I raised her. She was my baby as much as she was my sister. And now she is gone, and that is ok. It has to be ok, right? I mean, we are all born to die, and she always said she'd never live to see 50 and she was right. She had a better sense of her own mortality than most. I got a taste of it in May and I get it now, get that Life is short, but more than that, get that My Life is short and it is meant to be lived fully and honoured fully.

And so I grieve, here on my bed, sitting cross-legged, looking into the photo, into the window of the past, honouring my feelings.... and being... being sad. And that is good. Tears wash away the strain of holding in the grief and that is good, too.

It's all good. Even missing those who have moved on to whatever comes next. Sometimes I forget to remember that. Miss ya Sis.

Freeing Persephone

Persphone and Pomegranate by Rossetti

This whole sad hiatus has been somewhat productive, creatively. Yes, I've been doing some rather dark poetry, but I've gotten some lovely photographs here and there, and I even managed to finish an erotic story and get it submitted to the Sex & Spirituality anthology that Samba Mountain Press is publishing this summer. Hopefully it will be accepted. I called it Freeing Persephone. Here is an excerpt:

"What do you want?" His voice was careful-sounding, almost neutral.

In that moment I understood with perfect clarity that the antithesis of death is sex. That the act of procreation, of self-perpetuation, was the only consolation my body and spirit could accept. The previous evening, in an unsuccessful attempt to cope with my grief, I'd tried meditating on the Buddhist thought-problem: If the only certainty in Life is Death, and the time of death is uncertain, what am I supposed to do? The answer, apparently, was Fuck.

"Make love to me," I asked of him.

And he did.

He began by worshiping my back, the entirety of which is an erogenous zone with a sensitivity level just shy of my clitty. Stoke a cat from head to tail and she will raise her hips, purring and kneading the bed. I became more and more feline with every scrape of his whiskers, every caress of his fingers. The warmth of his mouth and the tickle of his breath were delicious. He soon reduced me to a mindlessly writhing creature whose gasps and moans held an entirely different meaning than the ones just moments previous.

I ground my bottom upwards into him and gasped as I felt his hardness wedge into the cleft between my cheeks. My need escaped me in a low hiss, a sound we both knew well. He pressed my thighs apart and ran a hand along my flesh. My labia opened to his fingers and weeped like the skin of a ripe nectarine splitting under the pressure of its own juices. Deftly, he strummed the folds of my center, delving deeply into my heat, coaxing my clitty out from under its hood.

I ached with both need and despair even as I rode his fingers. I wanted him and I didn't. I wanted the transport, the sweet oblivion, that only he could provide in that moment, and I hated him for it, hated him for making me want him even in the midst of devastating grief. I was born of the fruit of good and evil, but I'd eaten the seeds of the knowledge of life and death and I wanted to know, in every fiber of my being, that I was alive. Alive!

I fought the impending climax even as I craved it. So he wrung it from me. Wrung it from me with the twist of his fingers inside me, with the jolt of his arm rocking me, and finally, finally, with the pop of his thumb through the star of my anus. I cried out as flashes of white lit my retinas and then flung myself against the bed in a paroxysm of pleasure that rocked me for a good minute, probably two.

I surfaced with a gasp, drenched in sweat, my body still trembling. I rolled over onto my back, pushing my hair away from my face, and when I opened my eyes, he was there. His eyes were dark, his face flushed with excitement, and his sex... Oh sweet heavens, it was so full of blood that it bounced with each beat of his heart.

His hand tangled in the hair at the back of my head, pulling me inexorably forward.

"Suck me," he demanded, and I did. He rose over me like the lord of the underworld, Hades himself, and as I wrapped my mouth around the inflamed pomegranate-colored cap, I felt a kinship with Persephone, trapped in the Underworld, pining for the world of the living.

I worked my mouth artfully upon him. I love oral sex. It is its own form of worship, of worshiping the divine spark in my partner. I gave myself up to it, to the sacred joy of it. I was Persephone, and the cock I worshiped with my mouth was a flaming torch, and the thighs before me were sheaves of grain, and the passion-blurred man presiding over me, he was a god, my god. Oh god, please, please, I panted, begging for the fruit of his pleasure. When he came his body arched and shuddered, and his hands forced me to pull back, so that he filled my mouth instead of my throat. He tasted like sea salt and persimmon, and tart, yes, a bit tart like pomegranate, I fancied, as I swallowed his seed.

The tides of life take another sandcastle

More sad news this weekend. One I love is on hospice. I will likely be attending her funeral before the end of the year. It is agony, knowing this, knowing this on the one year anniversary of my failed attempt to commit her to medical care involuntarily. She's lived longer that I expected, though I don't think few would consider her existence anything resembling 'living'. Ah well.

The nice thing is that I had someone at hand to hold me after I'd gotten the news about her condition. He lay with me on my bed and held me, and kissed my forehead and my eyelids, and soothed me with his hands and his mouth and his words. Genuine intimacy in combination with vulnerability has been a balm for the pain of loss. It has opened doors within us both.

Elie Wiesel said, "When a door closes, another opens. It is the same door." Life, pain, death, loss... None of it has any meaning except what I give it. What will I make her death mean about her life, my life, the world, the legal system, the medical establishment? What will I make the love I feel for him mean, I wonder. Even as something ends, there is a beginning. It is cyclical, ebbing and flowing like that tide, and the lives we're building are castles of sand. It means nothing, in and of itself--it means only what I make it mean. Soon the tides of life and death will claim another sandcastle, and in that clearing, something new will arise. Let it be Hope, I beg. Let it be Hope.

Rock in a sea of change

It is August, and yet I can feel autumn coming, I feel it in the crispness of the morning air. I see it in the tops of the vine-maples, whose green leaves are just starting to blush yellow-orange-red. Autumn brings change and usually I welcome it. But these days I feel like I am under siege with changes. I feel like a rock at sea and yet in sight of the shore, with waves rushing and splashing around me. I know I am a rock, and I know that it would take a lot to undermine me, but being an island of peace in a sea of change is challenging. Those I love are thrashing about, battling issues of health, relationships, work and finances. And I have my own battles, too. Change is coming. I'm not sure where I'll be a month from now. All I can do is choose what comes, whether it is what I would prefer or not. Choose it, and choose to live powerfully in the face of the uncertainty, absurdity, and breathtaking beauty that is life.

Everybody's got a story

So.. I was contacted by a gentleman via my stories on Literotica and we've entered this dialogue . He told me a bit about himself and asked me if I had any advice as to how he could be more sensual. I responded as follows:

If you want to be more sensual in a sexual way, more comfortable with your sexuality, then I would recommend that you make love to yourself. Masturbation, with self-love. I masturbate daily. I treat myself to long baths twice a week... I shave, oil my legs and mound, and retire to my bed for an evening of fantasy and voluptuous masturbation.

And because he'd not had much success in his intimate relationships the past few years. I asked him some questions:

You say that the women you have been with in the past you were able to be open and sensual with, but now, you aren't sure you can. What has changed? What happened in your past that you are getting hung up on?

He responded with his story. A good story, a painful story, an honest, self-revealing story that moved me and inspired me. A story of a man who suffered a profound loss and still went on to create an extraordinary life for himself. I responded with:

As for what you wrote.... There isn't anything wrong with you. Really.

I think that what went awry for you in your relationships is what happens to most of us, including me. And it has to do with Fear.

The thing about Fear is that we will always feel fear. Our fears will never go away. We may resolve some of our fears, but we will always encounter situations in our lives that cause us to feel afraid. And most of us respond to life out of fearful places. We let our fears get in the way of living life. We allow our fears and our pasts to dictate how we respond to the current situation instead of being present to what is really going on. But I've learned that it doesn't have to be or stay that way. Before I tell you what I've learned, let me share a bit of my story with you, so we can establish that I do understand where you are coming from and why you feel as you do.

My mother left me with my grandparents when I was 10. My grandfather died that same year. My father got custody and moved us to a new town, and he moved my sisters and I nearly every year from then on. I lost my mother, my friends, the life I knew, over and over again. I was so tired of the pain of loss, and so afraid of losing people, that I stopped bothering to form attachments at all. When I entered romantic relationships, I insisted that my lovers understand that the relationship would end, sooner or later, and that I could not, would not, be possessed. I was an emotional coward hiding under the guise of being a 'free spirit', and I knew it, and I knew myself for a fraud.

In my early 30's things started changing. I faced the fact that the way I approached life and the methods I used to cope with the stresses, disappointments, problems, and fears in my life were not working, and I went looking for something that did work. I read self-help books, did two years of therapy, wrote in my journal, conversed with people, attended worshops, and contemplated my life.

And one of the things that became apparent was that I needed to be courageous. I needed to have the courage to face that I would always have fears and problems--that there was no magic wand that would smooth out the road of life ahead of me--and that I needed to find the courage to not let those things stop me from living my life right now.

One of the Christophers in my life told me that I also needed to stop trying to plan and predict life. Intellectually, I understood what he said. I understood the argument that if one can plan and predict life, then one is not living life... one is re-living the past by over-laying it on the future. But recently, I GOT it. I got what he meant on a visceral level. I got the whole thing Jung said about neurotic suffering. I got the whole thing about fear of the uncertainty of life causing me to pull as much of the familiar past forward into my future as I could. I realized that in my fear I was forcing myself to re-live the past, even though I really didn't want to. I really, really, don't want to relive the past. It is dead, and there is nothing for me there.

Today, the future is wide open. It is a vast nothingness, a place of potentials, and I have the power to chose to either fill it with the expectations and fears and disappointments of the past, or create the life I want to live out of it. And I want to live an extraordinary, vibrant, fulfilled life. And since I want to live an extraordinary, vibrant, fulfilled life, I am choosing to BE an extraordinary, vibrant, fulfilled person. But in order to be those things, I had to accept that fear would always be a part of my life, and find in myself the courage to not let it stop me from living the life I want to live and being the person I want to be.

So there it is. That's my story, and my advice. Find the courage to let your fears remain where they belong, in the past. Sure, you may open up to someone and you may get hurt. That's Life. That's the risk we take. But being hurt isn't so bad, and adults are by nature far more compassionate than we give them credit for. So open up to lots of people. Play the odds. Keep trying. Keep living. Keep being the person you want to be, and you will find that others will be drawn to you, to that person you are being, and you will have the love and companionship you have chosen for yourself. Really.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Free-spirit

"It is easy for you to say, you were raised to be a free-spirit," said a friend I've made this past year. He had asked my thoughts on the imminent 'big step' he and his girlfriend of 18 months were about to embark upon: moving in together. The last girlfriend he lived with drove him nuts in short order and he was reluctant to put himself into the same position again. I told him I could understand that all too well, but at the same time, that I considered the practice of using past experience to predict relationship outcomes to be a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. I told him to take the reasonable precautions and then relax and be open to the possibilities in this relationship, which has nothing to do with the old one, unless he makes it so. His comment about it being easy for me to say made me smile. The road to this place has been far from easy, as my closest friends will attest.


For all that I grew up around a bunch of carefree hedonists, there was little stability, consistency, or parenting. In one form or another I raised myself, four sisters, and three parents. My parents were young, self-absorbed, and oblivious to the danger they put their daughters in. I learned first-hand what could happen, and spent my teen years vigilantly trying to protect my siblings from predators. I developed stress-responses and habits, expectations and fears, that stood me in good stead for survival, but handicapped me when I attempted to join the mainstream, to attempt to seem 'normal', to develop and sustain romantic relationships. When I was 18 I returned from a few months in Europe and developed an inexplicable aversion to strangers and unfamiliar places that grew until I was afraid to leave my home. The world of possibilities was terribly large, and my experience of it quite dark in ways. I wanted to try to make sure that whatever I did, whoever I met, created only positive outcomes. I was young and foolish, and terribly controlling. Eventually, I overcame the fear of people, but the fear of the unknown, unknowable, and uncertain became the core of my existence. I did not feel afraid--I was afraid. I did my best to cope, and I grew in and changed in spurts and often lost as much ground as I gained. But I kept working at it, trying to learn what I needed to do to reach for the next rung on the ladder. Striving to become more fully alive and aware, more fully me. All the while keeping in mind that as difficult and slow a process as it seems, even plants can climb ladders.


Just three years ago I was in a miserable relationship that should have ended years earlier but did not, for reasons I cannot recall. We rarely had sex, argued often, had different wants, needs, desires. But we loved each other, and it seemed we thought that was enough. I suppose we preferred being miserable together to being miserable alone. Admittedly, it was a difficult time for me--four people I loved died in as many years and I think I could not face any more loss. When that relationship ended I went into therapy, determined to learn new coping mechanisms and break old patterns, determined to address the issues and complaints my partners had given voice to over the years. And in the therapy- process I chose meditation instead of medication, and did the hard internal work, and read and explored and conversed and contemplated and slowly came to the realization that nearly everything I need I already have within me, and that fear of loss, of death and uncertainty and the 'other', is natural. But rather than deny those fears, rather than sublimate or ridicule them, I realized that it was best to recognize fear for what it was, and allow myself to feel it--let it fill me and flow out of me and let another emotion fill me--love, hope, joy. One day I realized that while I will never be rid of fear, I do not have to be ruled by it.


And I have to remind myself of this daily. I no longer tell myself not to be afraid, or to stop being silly. I remind myself that it is ok to feel afraid. I tell myself that it is ok to feel afraid, but it is not ok to use fear as an excuse not to live every day as fully as I can, to use it as an excuse to avoid embracing the fullness of life. It is not easy. I am flattered that, for all I feel that I am struggling and flailing around, I am somehow managing to meet the challenges of life with enough grace that others think it comes easily to me. But at the same time, I admit that it is coming easier to me--more and more I find myself practicing acceptance and facing each moment with equanimity and spontaneity. They are coming more easily. And perhaps one day I really will be a free-spirit. Who knows? For now I'll savor feeling free-spirited every moment that I can.

In memorium

Ten days ago, I lost a friend.

We met online just over a year ago. We never touched, never saw each other smile, but we talked often, wrote, shared of ourselves. He guided me through my first attempt at editing a poem of mine, and I listened and gave feedback on a novel he was writing. Over the past year he went through many changes, several crises, strain in his marriage, etc; and me, I was working too hard, suffering through the crisis of my sister's health, and juggling an active social life. He developed a crush of sorts on me, and I discouraged it as best I could without abandoning our friendship, because the level of communication and understanding we shared was something special.

I tried to get him to tell his wife about me, to be less secretive about our relationship. But he was afraid. He did something stupid on New Years Eve, something not involving me, thankfully, but the effects were that he sent me an email stating that he had to break off our relationship because his behaviour was damaging his marriage and hurting his wife.

I've gone through a wide range of emotions. I recognize them as the grieving process. Loss. I've always been so bad about loss. But he taught me a lot in the past year, and now he is teaching me to grieve, as my therapist says I should.

This past year I learned a lot about the pros of putting myself out there emotionally--of taking risks: Joy, pleasure, love. This past week I've learned the cons, as well: Pain, loss, suffering.

And so far, I've no regrets. I could take away the lesson that I was stupid to become emotionally involved with someone I never met, but that is cowardice speaking. My life has been enriched for knowing him, and that is the lesson I will take away from this... keep taking risks, keep loving, continue to make connections and grow.

As for him, I wish him well. I wish him happiness and laughter and good health. He knows my boundless compassion and he has it. I will continue to include him in my metta meditations. I have always said that even when a relationship between two people must change, the things they love about each other do not. Love does not stop. At least... not for me.

Goodbye dear.