I’m in love. I’m in a new love relationship and it is sweet. In fact, it’s many things, like any relationship.
When I’m in love, I feel so alive, so full, so rich. In making love with this new love, I’m being asked to open my heart and body to an ever deepening experience of vulnerability and tenderness. I’m being asked to savor life through this body, and to trust that, even though being in this woman’s body feels exceedingly vulnerable, there is also a gorgeous richness and ripeness available to me precisely because I am alive in this female body.
This is the edge I’ve always felt as a woman – the edge between the possibility of living a life of deep-feeling and sensuality, the full expression of eroticism, and the vulnerability that seems to be inherent in living life in a woman’s body – a body in which we receive our lover into ourselves. I don’t know about you, but to me this edge is where aliveness happens, where the rawness of life touches me in a most human way.
I suppose it is much like a flower. When petals open to the sun, the flower shows its most tender and vulnerable places, and it is in this opening to life that we get to experience the full, rich beauty of the flower. I have a not-so-secret love affair with flowers, for just this reason. I am drawn into them because of the stark contrast between their softness and the harsh world in which they grow. They are both luminous and numinous, one of the most beautiful examples of the ephemeral nature of life here on earth.
As I deepen into my new lover, I am beginning to open, a little more willingly each day, to feeling this ephemeral experience of life, knowing that this, too, won’t last forever. Every relationship ends at some point. As I learn to trust what my lover offers me each day, I also open to the realization that I have just as much to offer to my lover and there is no point in holding back my gifts.
This is the exchange of giving and receiving that love and life are truly about. It isn’t about staying open all the time; rather it is tuning into the dance of the heart that opens and closes, into the breath that comes and goes, into the rhythms of the moon that waxes and wanes.
To open in this way, I’m having to question many of the beliefs I’ve held about the nature of exchange, the exchange inherent in giving and receiving. I’ve had deep fears that I would have to give so much away in order to receive; that receiving put me in a position of weakness; that I was a better person if I gave more than I got; that I had to earn everything I was offered; and that all some people want to do is take.
All of these beliefs cause me to see the world in a way that is distorted, and that causes me to not trust others or my own natural neediness as a human being. They caused me not to trust life, itself.
When we create and express and share this prosperity with the world through our work and love, we come into flow, the flow of eroticism in a physical world that is alive and pulsing with abundant prosperity.
Yes, life, itself, is my new love. Life is teaching me how to receive and in this teaching, I am learning how to give in a healthier way. This is the most erotic, sensual, sexual dance I’ve danced. Life is in a constant state of arousal, constantly in the arc of orgasm, coming into being, letting go into death.
Here, in this dance, I’m discovering prosperity, for what could be a more prosperous life that living the full arc of creation – both many, many times, and one big long arc of a life fully lived, fully alive?
Here, in this dance, I’m really discovering how to be fully in relationship with myself, finding the dance of the feminine and masculine with me, the giving and receiving, the pulsing out and the drawing into.
I’m not saying it is easy, nor that I do it perfectly. But I am learning to come back to the dance. To open once again. To say yes to this lover.
Can you feel it? Can you feel this arc of orgasm in your own life? This is a kind of prosperity that can never be taken away, can never be lost, can never lose its sheen in the light of your own heart and soul. The abundance of life is all around us, an abundance that lives and dies, comes and goes. None of it is ours, nor was it ever ours. We neither deserve it, nor do we not deserve it. It is life. Giving and receiving allows us to participate in this flow for as long as we are here. That, in itself, is enough.
(via Julie Daley)
