Musings..

The next morning, Mehr still greeted me with respect and loving kindness. He was of his own accord but still sensitively checking in, the affections born of our connection the night before still present but not enamoured. I anxiously awaited a visit from the shaming internal voices, waiting for them to begin their reign of terror. Their attempts at wreaking havoc upon my sense of self respect for drunkedly disrespecting myself by jumping into bed with yet again a perfect stranger. Curiously, those voices never came. There was both a closeness and a distance that remained between us. Our closeness born of the extremly intimate bonding that had taken place just hours before, yet a distance in our knowing that what happened for us in those hours did not follow a lengthy getting to know one another, 'nor did it seem either of us felt it neccessary to do so because we had united in that way. I was deeply touched by what happened that night for a number of reasons. I think for many of us, sexuality is not seperate from a moralistic view on what frameworks are appropriate for engagement. In my experiences individually and from what I have observed in others, we attempt to moralistically arrive at viewpoints, informed by our questions and therefore experiences in the world that we then develop values, principles and codes of conduct that determine our methods and limits of sexual engagement. The challenge of course is that if we construct and live out these things with a rigidty, we impose our mythologies that are relevant for a time but ultimately come to a place of obstructing the ways in which we may be challnged to grow, or more importantly be given opportunity to heal. Although I was able to detect that there were two underlying impulses that drove my sexuality, one of self honoring and one of self destruction, I was still attempting to define these behaviors through the lens of these structures. I assumed up until this point that when i "jumped into bed too quickly" was when i was in the mode of objectifying myself and that if i gave rise to the lengthy dance of romantic intimacy prior to engaging someone physically, as i was exploring with sundancer, that i was awakening to the calls of self honoring. What made this experience with mehr so different from the ones with the others, in which my crossing the threshhold of engagement left me with days of enshadowed consequences? Specifically because at the onset of my engagement with Mehr, he as a person did not entice in me a deep feeling of interest. I still do not have the answers to this question, yet a few observations have explained how deeply moved i was by this experience. Mehr and I had connected under some seemingly similar contexts as many other one night explorations had taken shape along my destructive history. Yet from the beginning he demonstrated honor and respect. He had taken interest in my replies to his questions through out the night about who i was and what i was passionate about in the world. I had watched his reactions to me like a hawk throughout the evening. I could sense his desire and observed if his desire was in fact enticed by me and shaped by the environment or whether he was in a state of desiring overall. Although he mingled with many different people throughout the night as the rest of us had, he did not demonstrate a seething desire for others, yet in fact had his eye on simply me for the duration of the evening. Yet there were so many beautiful women present. His passion for me while we were making love was genuine and authentic, ruthless but also gentle. He respected himself and respected me by seeking to protect himself without any dialogue on how his pleasure might be obstructed by wearing a condom, an experience i have had so many times before. When we awoke in the morning, he did not try to overcompensate on behalf of what we had experienced the night before either by pretending to be more involved with me than he really was or by treating me like i was as insignificant to him as i might have been when he met me only the night before. Neither of us had any reason to make this out to be anything other than it was. A beautiful and deeply intimate sharing of two people, in one space in time, if only for the pure reason of our mutual pleasure and enjoyment. A beautiful transparency, lost of any fictional dramas or stories meant to justify what was already justifiable. What made it even more beautiful for me was the lack of a need either of us displayed in securely protecting the experience for ourselves and seeking to replay it. In his coming to kiss me goodbye before leaving the firespinner/wyldewoman household the next day, the simple goodbye represented all that had been. A closeness and a distance. There were no phonenumbers exchanged, an asking of when we might see eachother or how we might continue what we had begun. 'Nor did i secretly hope for one and anxiously grapple with why it was not occuring. It was like a brilliant unfolding of gratitude in the present without seeking to hold, control, make pain out of, tell a story abount but instead just allow it to be, for what it is, for what it was, for what it needed to be. Yet in the tenderness of that kiss, there was also a respect, an honor and an acknowledgement for what there was and what there had been for one single moment in the eternity of time. It seemed finally, my fast was broken, I had come out of the insatiable devorous hunger that the forced abstinence of my sexual expression had seethed and prowled for and in it's surrender had been given that which i was seeking but never coming up against. I didn't know if it would happen again and it didn't matter, because something in me was free and for once i trusted that whatever moments were next to come, whatever gifts they brought with them or lessons to impart, would be the right ones, in their own rightness of time and rightness of place. In the meaantime I would continue my journey stumbling blindly through the dark, presented with new experiences for trial and error and just trying to continue to identify and honor the feelings in my body, trusting them as the only source of truth as my guide.