The Nature of Our Love Making

"Every time we make love fully to another human being we make love to everything that lives and breaths". (Terry Tempest Williams) It could be that the very nature of sex, of the energy that we've labeled 'sexual' - in addition to the miraculous necessity of procreation - is to reveal the unique wild language of our soul's discourse with the universe. How would your love making change if you allowed for this larger significance? Perhaps even more to the point, how would you define 'love making' if you were to accept this larger definition of what we have labeled 'sexuality'? Maybe your understanding of making love would grow to include acts and activities which, before, you only imagined as perfunctory or mundane. Perhaps you would see that it is possible to make love with a pine tree, a great blue heron or a high-desert water fall. When this happens, we have re-wilded our love making. When we allow our love making to be wild we have the opportunity to both experience and honor the most primal of all dances. The dance of sexuality is the dance between life & death and masculine & feminine. In allowing our love making to be wild we are inviting ourselves to be unpredictable; to be soft and slow then fast and furious, both dark and light, tender and fierce and to feel the force of the elements, of nature itself coursing through us in this dance. When we allow our love making to be wild it's as if we are sending flaring red rescue beacons into the night sky, starting a bonfire blaze on a once-deserted beach, jumping up and down on a mountainside while screaming, "Here I am.... I'm down here..... Find me.... Take me....." We are courageously taking a stand against this culture's catastrophic inheritance of shame, an inheritance which  insists in the fallacy of our fundamental imperfection. This dangerous and to-the-marrow lie has become so all-powerful in so many of us, it often trumps our innate innocence, curiosity and desire to love; it trumps our innate longing to fall in-love with the world.

When, in our love making, we allow our bodies to communicate the depth of our longing, the voraciousness of our hunger, our wisdom and our innocence, our "no!" and our "yes!", our rage, our vulnerability, our uncertainty, our tears and our unbridled laughter ... when we take all THAT and throw in the fullness of our grief, make no mistake, we are courting disaster of the most glorious sort. We are declaring that we trust we are held by a profoundly intelligent perfectly unsentimental web of life, in which we are as perfect as the purple breast of a house finch, the strong woody stalk of a sunflower or the raging spring creek stirred murky with the rich organic matter of a winter's frozen stillness.

Once we say "yes" there is no going back. Once we have gotten a glimpse of this web and our own crucial position within it, vast facades of predictability and certainty begin to fall away. Things which before felt as important to us as oxygen itself (like being able to say, "I'm a lawyer" or knowing where you will spend Thanksgiving the year after next) become inconsequential. With the slightest invitation, these irrelevant, soul-numbing certainties (which you once thought were necessities) will begin leaping out of the windows of your house as if the whole place were on fire. In the space they once occupied, slowly arrive, not answers, but questions. Thousands of beautiful questions which, of course, have no answers. Once you have burned the map created to codify your own domesticity, you realize it is not answers you now seek but rather the intimacy inherent in the act of asking questions. Asking the scrubby pine clinging to the edge of the scree field along the third flatiron, "how did you become such an elegant instrument for the wind?" you know full-well you are not seeking answers. The purpose of asking is simply to experience love making with the wild. To allow the awe you now feel for everything around you, including yourself, to pierce your body like the wildest of wild lovers; a lover who will take everything you have to offer without apology or hesitation because s/he knows that to not do so is to dishonor the most fundamental laws of nature; a lover who knows that what is left in the wake of this wild love making will be the absolute essence of you. The world is hungry for the absolute essence of you.

We will not survive without it.