Embracing the Eco-Erotic
“And now you ask in your heart,
‘How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?’
Go to your fields and your gardens,
And you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.”
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet
I had a dream last night where I was partner dancing with a beautiful stranger and someone broke us apart. I protested, “but I’ve been single for six years!” This late into my pregnancy it’s actually quite surprising to dream about love. While my dreams in the early stages of pregnancy were all about processing loneliness and the longing for the beloved made manifest, in the last few months I did something I haven’t tried in about a decade. I stopped my dreaming practices. As a dream teacher, this was rather uncomfortable, since living by example and maintaining my practices is so important to me. Yet with the loosening of the threads that have made up the whole of my identity (a byproduct of pregnancy), I needed to let go of the “work” part of dreamwork, and just see what my daughter and I wanted to dream together.
There’s been your fair share of chaotic nonsense dreams, but throughout the last few months, my dreams have been peppered with the sensuous and the erotic. Not in the way of lovely mysterious encounters with dreamy ( <—- yes pun) men, but with the inherent eros that ripples through nature. I have dreamt of bathing in thermal pools with mermaids, of swimming in a river canyon lined with blooming jasmine, of surfing with dolphins through rainbow phosphorescent seas, and of sailing on rope swings through a verdant forest. All of these types of dreams carry a note of the sensuous mixed with exhilaration, a feeling we often attribute to intimate encounters, or falling in love. However, these are all propelled by encounters with the natural world.
Sitting at the edge of spring, and the edge of motherhood, I am becoming aware that these years of “singleness” (whatever THAT means), have also afforded me the opportunity to cultivate something precious. A deep, wildly sensuous affair with the living earth. Do you ever pick a single rose petal from a flower just to caress your lips with it until the petal becomes translucent? Or go to the river early, when the water is still cool, just so you can feel the sun warm your skin as you dry out on smooth rocks? Or inhale the scent of a beehive in May, eyes closed, feet bare?
Do you know what this kind of behavior can do to your imagination? You can learn to inhale more than air. To breath up the deep green of a temperate rainforest, or the indigo blue of a desert night. You can see more in a ripple of hills and clouds than a horizon. You can float into the hanging gardens of Babylon. Hell, your own skin can bloom in peonies and anemones.
I think, this is perhaps what bees do every day. Riding waves of scent and light we only glimpse in our dreams. Enfolded in flowers. Submerged in the hum.
It’s also the inherent terrain of the child who is allowed to freely be with and of the Earth. In the era of climate change and biodiversity loss, we need more than ever to cultivate this relationship with nature. With the sensate experience of pleasure as it relates to sun, sky, wind, rain, sea, sand, fur, flower, snow, and stone. Our ancestors most surely did. Maybe not in the near past, but somewhere in your blood there are the whale-song memories of cultures who courted the moon and laid flowers at the feet of the sea.
This kind of relationship to the beloved that is more-than-human is not simply a pleasure, it is a necessity. When we feel more than our basic survival is at stake, when we feel our soul is entwined with this fluttering, heaving Earth, we change not just how we fight for it, but how we love.