Eco-sexuality

An ecological pursuit of attraction and erotic intimacy

I sometimes wonder what it feels to be a bee finding its way across the skies to the open expression of a flower in her brief and beautiful wakefulness of the moment. The feeling that surges through a bear when he senses the closeness of a hive, risking the attack of stings to relish in the sweet creamy liquid gold and the plump larvae hidden in all the delicate crevices diligently crafted by the workmanship of bee-nation.

What might it feel like after a season of rain and snow and the slow turning of the world permitting the sun to linger, just a little bit longer, offering winter a moment to shed its stiffness while the trees by the creek, softened by the sunshine, suck up water from their beds to intermingle with layers of sapwood, thickening with the nourishment of expanded sensitivity.

This living world is brimming with cross-creation, insemination of interspecies procreation, the lifeforce of each being in interwoven cooperation to feed a conspiracy of continual movement that re-re-redefines aliveness.

When I press myself against the pulse of our erotically culminating world, I am returned to the eros that foams at my surface, gravitating me towards mystery, curiosity, and a not knowing that spurs a courage formed in the basin of my sensing heart, to seek a space for creation to be known.

Attraction, I am terrified of what you do to me.

I am afraid of the force in which you present the source of my attention outside of me.

You are a snake charmer coaxing the shadow within me that I am utterly terrified of. A shadow that reveals my most desperate and unruly wildness, the sort of longing that causes atoms to split, explosions to rearrange an inner sanctuary that no longer holds peace in the face of the disruption that you reveal in the wake of your path.

Attraction, do with me what you will, and I will feel what you are truly presenting me to.

The sexuality of the dominating class of men who have directed prostitution rings, raged wars against the feminine, bombed the homes and schools of children and women situates itself as the pornographic authority for dictatorship in what we field as attraction.

Is it the power we are hungry for? Is it the challenge of owning and capturing? Is it the feeling of adrenaline, the distraction, the charge that engages our dopamine centers?

What is the attraction that returns me to this land? The kind that blends my body back into the hillsides. The feeling that has me thrumming with the movements of my ancestors, drawing me closer to their songs, their mountains, their people who welcome me home in surprise that this unseen influence has brought me to their front doors.

When we are drawn, does the calculus of possibilities need to be diagramed, edited or documented? Can we simply surrender to this draw, this closing of a gap, this beckoning ripening like a mosquito attracted to the flow of blood within our veins?

In this world, this culture, I grieve the danger of being an erotic being. My eros is my creativity, my feelings, the expressive force in which the storms and the howling winds in their ferocity clear out the staleness of accumulated grievances, returning us to the edge of death, the place where the orgasmic experience of aliveness is revealed in crescent slivers of revelation.

To fully claim our erotic nature is to no longer be afraid of her. It is to situate ourselves within the birthright of our sensual natures, to recognize that the stretching of boundaries, the leaning in closer that attraction provokes is forcing us to reckon with our restrained realities.

The mating dances of our times has us confused and misguided, shamed and misinterpreted when following the call of attraction. What if this call was never meant to require a direct response but a channel to power our transformation in devotion to the great mysteries our lives are meant to answer?

dancing with the creek and nanu

Attraction within the framework of my young adult days was simply a pathway towards sex. To experience attraction, only pointed towards one avenue of what was deemed a by-in-large, satisfactory experience. It was confusing when I had sex for the first time at 20 years old, and found the experience to be uncomfortable, painful, and isolating.

I figured that this was just how it was. I was too scared to vulnerably express both to my partner or to my friends that this was my experience. I was afraid that I would be cast away, unable to keep up with a culture that forced my authentic experience with the erotic to lay dormant.

Though I harbored within me the eros born from being a child of these sensually alive lands pulsing with the energy of creation, both I and the world around me, were parceled out into pieces, of value for only what could be extractable. A tangible penetrable, minimizing reality of what sex-as-we-know-it has become. Of land as grab-able, own-able, settle-able.

Rather, what I longed to feel was an evoking of our wildness, our curiosity, our pulling outwards into the coursing momentum of a sultry unknown that bridges worlds. So we may be as we are born to be, of the stars, of the galaxies, of this earthly body that stores memories of belonging to the dirt, the gods, a human constellation of a village of beloved kin.

Encountering eco-sexuality

When I was 27 years old, on my way to the coast by the Oregon and California border to meet my partner at the time, I was instead met by a breakup email from him. I had a choice then, to continue the backpacking journey that we had planned together, or to head home.

I decided to continue, too ashamed to head back defeated, having to explain myself to my friends. Rather, I felt I could remain in the grief without having to break the news for at least a week.

The pain I experienced on this trek was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. It was as if my insides were curdling outwards to the world, splitting me apart, wanting to run away from this home that had betrayed them. If my insides were on fire, what was outside me, was a misty sanctuary.

I had found this fern canyon on tumblr when I was only a high schooler. I remember feeling drawn to this place, like magic lived here, and voices from deep below could be heard. Indeed, this was a special place home to some of the last old growth redwood forest in the world. The ground was covered with redwood needles, soft, bouncy, smelling of wet earth, and I walked these pathways barefoot, tears falling from my face, feeling lost but somehow held.

I realized, I didn’t even care that I was no longer in a partnership, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be with this person. What was causing me to rupture inside was the recognition of how hard I had clung to this relationship like a life jacket buoyant to the possibilities I was too afraid to claim for myself. I saw how much I had clung to timelines, to projects, to trips, to people, stripping them from their essential presence and wrapping the descriptions they represented around me to clothe my trembling and naked worthlessness. It was a dire state.

I was at my lowest point.

When you have reached the state of absolute disrepair, where everything you thought you knew falls like scales from your eyes, all that is left is… surrender.

So I did all I could.

I got to my knees. In front of a massive redwood, so large I couldn’t even see where it begun to curve towards its other side. Lowering my head I expressed: my life is not my own anymore. I cannot be the director to this life. I do not know what I am doing. Please, I give my life to you spirit.

It was there that I shelved away any form of planning or future dreaming. I stopped looking to the future, I stopped expecting any kind of outcomes, relationships, friendships. I decided that I would go, a day at a time, into the mystery, into the release of my life to a power beyond me.

And, a year later I came back to this forest. This time, after a year of not knowing, my life had completely shifted. I was living out of my Subaru, learning about my own cultural ways for the first time, reckoning with the embedded supremacy culture I’d internalized and practiced as my own. From a lot of standards, I was a wreck, my possessions in cardboard boxes, untethered to a home, a job, a clear direction for literally anything. I was taking things moment to moment, not even certain where I’d sleep for a given evening.

I was headed to Oregon for a two-week martial arts camp, and I decided that I wanted to stop by the forest I had surrendered to a little over a year before to leave offerings and give thanks to the forest for offering me holding when I had come wounded, weakened, and in despair.

Though most of my external life felt shattered and confused, there was a strength in my spirit that had started to root in faith, in the unknown, in the spiraling circumstances of a life that had surrendered to the unfolding of mystery.

This time, the forest wasn’t cloaked in fog. The sun was out and as I walked on the padded mossy carpet and felt the nourishment of dappled sunlight filtering through the air, offering moments of warm embrace interspersed with the cool exhale of the shade. I was returning to the site of my surrender, the place where I let go of my wizened self, my masked persona, the way I wanted to be seen. I was here, back in the arms of the land that received me at my most destitute.

Feeling her happy and alive, gracious to receive me, I felt my senses light up knowing I could return and be received after showing the darkest least desirable shades of my inner world. It was as if love of immense proportions swaddled me in tender caresses spoken through thick humid air, chattering bird sounds, disappearing and reappearing spider webs, fallen logs melting into the humus of glorious life-giving decay.

Each step I took on the deer paths through the forest, was a partnering with the moment, a reintegration into the cast of nature beings that welcomed me as brethren, as cousin, as entangled in their lives. I was not outside of them but co-witnessing the moment as one.

It was here in gratitude carved out of grief that the love that radiates freely from the beings of the land lifted into the porous membrane of my heart through each wide-open receptacle of my body. Surging from the ground, passing through the whispering breeze, raining down on me as divinity from the skies, my being was electrified and brought to an orgasmic resonance with the brilliance of life gasping open into a movement so engulfed in feeling it filled out each corner of life.

I left this forest with many gifts, and a satisfaction that went beyond satiation for this moment in time. I was changed, reminded of my w-holiness, and reflected that the darkness I descended to was all part of the plan to break me open to feel the resonance of love I was born into.

I long to feel this awakened to the world. In my day to day this erotic recognition that these lands provided me is dulled down, dimmed in fear of being rejected. When I was given the permission to surrender to the depths of my despair and hurt I was able to trust in my belonging and give myself as my most open and receptive to this forest.

“When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.” – Audre Lorde

In fully feeling it all, even the uncomfortable, and to share in this feeling, is where we reveal the kind of intimacy that makes way for the erotic as opening to our power. The fullness, the intensity, the gradations of emotionality – to be sad and joyful at the same time, is to give ourselves to the complex layering of all of who we are.

What I had known as sex and attraction had required me to disassociate from my inner feeling, to cut off my cord to my inner knowing and to present a variation of attract ability that molded myself in the image of what I considered desirable and pleasurable.

Attraction as I had known it was not the electric feeling of being drawn towards, but rather the prize of worthiness that could only be doled out by humans governed by their own inner excitabilities and fallibilities in entrancement.

What eco-sexuality presented to me was a remembrance of the erotic as true permission. The wholeness of my body not separated from the wholeness of my spirit and the depth of my soul. In receiving me fully hollowed out, I was filled in with pure erotic expansion when I revisited the place of my surrender.

I wish for this in human love, and I hope, one day to experience this in relationship with another.

For now, this forest holds a special place in my heart, the kind of lover that changes me, shapes me, moves me towards learning how to receive others in their surrender, their hopelessness, and despair. Which, is, where many of us find ourselves in this time of great turning.

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