Category: reflections

bone-melting love

i was perusing elephant journal this morning and came across this rebecca lammersen article on making unknowable love. i felt the excitement of finding connection– finding someone who has described something of my experience. it’s a beautiful article and description of deeply connected, magical love-making… the kind of experiences i’ve finally found after years of searching.

a perfect sunday morning read. xo

a note to my lover

if i weren’t afraid of being sappy, i would tell you about how i feel right now. the mellow, slow swirling of your energy still moving all through my limbs and torso and pelvis. the way i still feel your delightful skin touching every inch of me. how delicious it felt to slide my naked body up against your sleeping warmth after my shower this morning, and how deeply loved i feel by you. 

vulnerability is my greatest strength and weakness. you receive my love so beautifully. trusting you to not use this to your own ends, as so many have done (wittingly and unwittingly), feels alternately elating and terrifying. but i have chosen to make trust and vulnerability a practice. and i have chosen you. 

i have chosen you.

xoxo

poly-what?

i have two lovers. i see them both regularly. i love and am loved by them both. they are both interesting, intelligent, loving, creative people and are very dear to me. they offer me similarly delightful yet entirely unique experiences of being loved and nurtured. my heart overflows with gratitude for each of them every day. i have rarely, if ever in my life, felt such bountiful love, pleasure, and delight. i feel like the luckiest woman alive.

this experience is also very challenging. i am not so keen these days on labeling myself, and don’t prefer the varying “poly” labels that many use to define their love/life choices. i don’t feel i owe an explanation to anyone, but as there is a tendency to assume that unconventional choices warrant explanation, i generally don’t share this part of my life. i have to remember which love i told which people about to minimize questions. i am getting better at being cagey.

i am meeting more and more people like me. people who reject conventional models of relating and are interested in moving into new ways of being. as we see the old models breaking down, it seems natural to me to reach for something different, something that suites us better. with the vast array of human diversity, everyone wanting (or needing) the same model of relationship is as unlikely as everyone having precisely the same nose, or experiencing music in exactly the same way. there is far too much (beautiful!) inherent variety within our species to ever achieve organic similitude.

daunting a task as it is to break down our social programming, i do believe it is key to being a happy and self-actualized person in this world. and considering the precarious state our world is in today, on so many levels, it is perhaps more critical to survival than ever before, to continuously and gently question our foundational values and beliefs, holding them with compassion and letting them go if they are no longer serving us.

unbreakable

fuck me until i break
until your mouth 
inhales my screams
and this emptiness inside of me
folds in on itself

fuck me like you don’t care
like i have the strength 
of a thousand goddesses
like i am 
unbreakable

fuck me.
throw me.
restrain me.
slap me.
put me where you 
want me
and take me.

take me.
for all the times i said no
for all the moments my voice was silenced
for each lewd look and whistle
for all the power that was taken from me
and for the darkness inside of me…

this time i speak 
and you hear me.

this time
i say yes.

national down syndrome day – sex & disability

today is national down syndrome day. as an ally of the disability community, i’d like to take this opportunity to address a topic i rarely see publicly addressed (and suspect/have reason to believe it is rarely privately addressed either): sexuality & cognitive disability.

i have a dear one in my life with down syndrome. i also have worked in the personal care and group home sector. across the board it has been my experience that adults with cognitive disabilities tend to be treated as children by even the most well-intended. since america still is in rampant denial of children/minors being sexual beings, it stands to reason that we would be equally unwilling to grant sexuality to adults with cognitive disabilities.

but the fact is, we are all sexual beings, and people with cognitive disabilities have sexual desires, just like people without cognitive disabilities.

josh (name has been changed), an adult with whom i once worked, had a cognitive disability. he was dating a woman who lived in a neighboring group home. through the time they dated, josh explicitly requested sex ed information on 3+ occasions, and was kindly and patronizingly denied each time. similar to our “abstinence only” myth, we believe that if we ignore something hard enough, it will disappear, that our children’s sexual urges will just disintegrate via repression. unfortunately, that has never been an effective method to keeping us safe, healthy, and informed. i have heard many stories over the years similar to josh’s. why is it that an adult can come forward respectfully asking for information on his sexuality, and we would refuse him?

we need a sea change around disability, almost as badly as we need it around sexuality. consensual sexual expression that does not inflict harm on others should be a fundamental human right, one of the immensely complex and beautiful potentialities of the human experience. if nothing else in this life, we should own our bodies, and have the right to expose them to the experiences we want.