On Love, Control, and a Room of One’s Own
Hello Dear Ones,
I wrote a poem about Love and Writing and Control and Intimacy for this week to be slurped and sipped below. And also some film recommendations on The Deep Sacrificial Lamb of Love. All below…
I am also calling in 5 women to work with me 1:1 next year in a deep coaching + mentorship container for the year.
I am simplifying my work with 2 offerings next year – Radical Awakenings group work as my group offering + 1:1 work as my intensive offering.
If you are interested in the year-long with me, read the below… if it touches you, well perhaps then we have some magic to make together in the land of eros, love, intimacy, writing, and expression… for an exploration call, reply to this email.
Enjoy this poem and stream of Heart… drink deeply, if it pleases you.
ON A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN:
At times, I have mistaken a quest for being good or happy or nice with being spiritual or “well.”
Like to be good, is to be well. Or to be spiritual, is to be nice.
But I have found, I neither want to be good or happy.
Or nice.
Those words are like faded billboards, dinosaur bones left behind from a time of Americana pleasantry and 5 cent roadside attractions.
Snickers bars that stick to the back of your teeth and leave your breath sugary, like a 5-year old after a birthday party.
White cracked picket fence posts
where women’s
heart dreams
and erotic yearnings,
were impaled invisibly,
dripping,
into garden beds
and thirsty seeds that blossom into
blood red roses.
“I was too busy loving a man to write,”
I told my muse In a hushed voice.
“My love, I’ll be back.”
I kissed her, a full kiss with tongue,
that ran down my spine in a feather of electricity.
The kind of kisses I have had so many times this life…
But I wonder, if I ever will again –
A kiss where nipples brush each other.
A nod to mermaids.
And a time of school girls hiding in closets.
Of soft feminine touch –
I am writing, which means I am breathing.
My words were leaking out in my love-making,
evaporating through my pores,
and tear drops onto his chest,
pooled into linen sheets I washed in hot water.
My unwritten words seeping into sewers –
This Charming Man.
For now, he only peeks out here and there,
pushing me deeper into my imaginal worlds to seek the God I seek,
to take long puffs of inspiration,
red lacquered fingernails dangling in mid-air –
Or perhaps it is he writing now.
Through the gift of his white Pollock-like-painting,
against my red womb walls.
An absorption of His Essence…
Possessed.
When a man,
A Real Man,
penetrates deeply into one’s being,
does he penetrate all the corners where you’ve been used to?
Hanging out in jazz cafes with Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller.
Sitting on their laps and whispering,
and flirting, and fawning,
and playing in the pool of pleasure?
Or does he leave you some interior real estate just for you?
A room of one’s own.
A soul room where you can still puff smoke and write letters by candlelight and feel God’s hands tight around you…
ON CONTROL:
But at the Kitchen Sink Drama of Human-ing,
do you catch yourself reminding him to do something,
or plan something,
or book something,
or eat something?
Making him your child,
or Assistant…
You promise you’ll catch these small missteps that chip away at both of you.
Moments you – from top to bottom – try and get what you want.
Act slightly disruptive and controlling, even manipulative.
Watching other people do that to their men makes you queasy, the controlling women or the passive ones…
As if there were only two options?
But these little slips are lubricated, if you choose to let yourself fully slide into them. Into the purple green bruise of your exposed attempts at control.
You’ll repent your lack of trust. And the moments your jaw became square and militant and you – everything about you – was hard and uninviting.
And these initiations happen with friends. The women around you who try and control you subtly, thinking perhaps you don’t notice. It’s always been this way and sometimes you let them control you. Make the decisions. Tell you where to go, and what to eat.
There’s something erotically infantilizing about it. Like they are gently stroking at your clit, lulling you. Like you’re playing house and it feels good to submit to someone. Like Victorian romantic friendship. And yet, in its under the cover tactics, you find it repulsive at the same time and want to rebel.
A bitter medicine.
Reminding you that every tiny wooden splinter of intimacy is felt when awake humans relate.
Even so, a tiny splinter can ruin a day, a week, a trip to paradise!
When he is around, every time you seem falsely cheerful, it’s obvious. Or subtly controlling, or gently steering, he sees it all, feels it all, it either draws him in or repulses him, in a strange, impersonal way.
As if you are simply two animals, or clouds, either bumping towards each other, or more fascinated with things elsewhere…
ON LOVE:
But when you’re buttery
and the words are not pushing…
When the sponge of your heart is gently dripping
down your center
and the lower valley is open,
warm,
teeming with life,
you’ve entered into the land of Being,
and there is something in the way you read poetry to each other here…
The kiss of two tongues that
stops
time.
That feels like a thirst being quenched at the bottom of your being.
And then, there are the moments he shuts you out. Becomes a ghost. You’ve known men like this… They can be so present and when they leave the room, though the body and breath hangs warm in the air, the room becomes cold. No one wants to admit one party is now gone…
Until someone does.
You say: “No, I will not speak to this ghost. Let me know when the man I love returns.”
Because sometimes you don’t have the energy for a rescue mission. Sometimes you don’t have the energy to even throw the life vest. He will have to find his own way out this time. Is that what they call tough love? Is this love? You aren’t leaving and neither is he.
You are writing.
You are Love, making it’s way through the Human’s pores, and eyes, and tongue.
It hurts. This Birth, in it’s exquisite Agony, and Ecstasy.
And the rain drops violently throw themselves against the window…
My Fave Films about the Ego’s Annihilation by The Love Between Two:
I am fascinated in the study of love and relationship across time, and art, and a certain quality of Depth of Love marked in them.
In the films below, the death of the old self is literalized.
I see it as a spiritual death, an ego death, the death of parts of self on behalf of the Union of the Two. So the third entity, the relationship, or the “we” is born.
Scene: The Sugar Love-Making and Death Scene in “Sweet Movie.” A beautiful dream of sweetness and metaphor and life and death. Beware of this one…
Film: Elvira Madigan. Another dream in death and love.
Film: Fando y Lis
The cemetery scene at 15 minutes in, the beauty… I’ve watched this film again and again since I was about 22. The Myth and Jodo’s power is deep.
My fascination is what happens when something is deeply sacrificed, metaphorically murdered even, on behalf of the Union… I made a few films and plays about this in my 20’s.
One is called The Heart Is What Remains and you can watch it HERE.
It’s a fever dream poem on Love, featuring music by some incredible artists: Colleen, Eluvium, Valet, and a past Love of mine.
I have yet to find out this Human Life what this Great Initiation feels like, but it fascinates me deeply.
If you find this style of expression and inquiry interesting… join us in Radical Awakenings next year for a laboratory of art and life, gates open again January 1st for a few days… x
