While I don’t want to admit it very often, I spend a lot of energy wondering whether I’m enough. Is this just a human thing? Are there folks out there who don’t spend energy this way?

I keep thinking to myself that the moment all of us just know that we’re fine is the moment gazillion tons of energy will be freed up for far more life-giving things.

There’s a radio station in our area that I used to listen to while driving. One day last month its rag-tag mix of 80s, 90s and current music got replaced with country. And not just country, but no-commercials-at-all country. When all the other stations are droning with hours of business jingles, this one is playing actual music. So nearly in spite of myself, I have been listening to country.

What has struck me more than anything in this new endeavor, beyond the worldview that’s felt more entrenched in traditional gender roles than most I currently observe, is the enoughness that permeates so much of it. People are singing about simple things, often very basic things, things that have little to do with money or education and a lot to do with friends. With love. With faith. And they’re belting it all out like it’d never occur to them that there are people who would be embarrassed to admit liking these things. That there are people who would never in a million years admit that their greatest dream is not to be famous or well-respected in fast-track circles or to be rich and beautiful or to travel the world on every holiday, but rather to live in a humble home, not even near a big city, to drive an old car, and to be rich only with food enough to eat and people to love and laugh and be neighborly with. To be rich with smelling earth smells, with growing things, with seeing the sun rise and set over mountains, rather than row upon row of buildings.

I live in the Silicon Valley, where money and multi-million dollar homes and ingenious intellectual and business pursuits are as common as air. I live where “enough” feels like a word from another planet, or if not that, spoken only to waiters about pepper or parmesan cheese.

So it has been with delight and a small sense of subversion that I have kept my radio tuned to the same station it’s always been, feeling my afraid-I’m-not-enough soul being nourished and healed in this most unlikely way. I come home from writing and from errands fretting less about what I don’t have or haven’t yet accomplished, content a lot more with what I actually *have* done and *do* have. The latter being foremost food, shelter, and wonderful people to love.

“Hell yeah, you’re enough!” I hear this music say. Or in Alan Jackson’s words,

“…it’s alright to be little bitty
Little hometown or a big ol’ city
Might as well share, might as well smile
life goes on for a little bitty while”

After that flurry of posts and conversations about sex and sexuality, my mood has shifted into a quieter one.  I’m not sure what to attribute this to, but for now it feels fine.

The highlight of my week was a trip I took to a shoe store on a rainy day.  I needed to return some sandals we had bought for Elijah, and after doing so, Elijah insisted on being put down.  He had noticed a girl - maybe 10 years old? - who he desperately wanted to follow.

Around the corner she and he went, and to his great delight, the girl had a brother AND a sister, both younger than she.  The youngest was a girl about 2, and when Elijah saw her, and she him, they embraced.  They held on for a very long time.

Without batting an eye, the brother, maybe 5 years old, looked me in the eyes, pointed at them with a hitch hiker’s thumb, and explained in his most adult, let-me-explain-this-clearly-to-you voice, “They’re in love.”

Yep, buddy.  I think they might be.

Wordpress is not on Kristin’s list of likeables right now.  Can anyone tell me why my AuthImage plugin isn’t working, even though it’s activated?  And can anyone tell me why my blacklist of words is not actually deleting comments that contain blacklisted words?  I am up to my eye balls in poker spam.

The lovely Sage has tagged me for a meme, so here goes:  5 things you may not know about me:

1. Any project that requires a trip to a hardware store makes me very happy.  I daydream about owning a home someday and building an add-on studio where I have places for writing, drawing, painting, collaging and recording music (!).  I would love a woodshop.  Perusing and learning about other people’s tools energizes me.
2. My first and most sustained career plan was to become a concert pianist.  I think I gave the plan up when high school started.
3. My closest brush with death (to my knowledge) was a cross-country ski trip I took with my sister and dad on my 13th birthday.  The trail we thought we were following never looped back to the parking lot, and by the time we realized this, it was getting dark, and in our t-shirts and sopping gloves and pants, we were freezing.  Literally.  We retraced our entire treck, the whole while begging my dad to let us lay down and sleep.  Luckily he didn’t (thanks Dad!).
4. At age 15 I spent a summer in Kenya, building a small dormatory for a little school on the edge of Lake Nakuru.  I went with an organization called Teen Missions, which I do not recommend.  Kenya, however, I do.
5. I am drawn to weather pages like moths to light.  Especially the ones in real live newspapers.  Like with colors showing all the different regions of temperature.  I like anything that gives me a big-scheme picture, come to think of it.  Maps.  Theories that cover huges swaths of history or geography.  Anything that makes the lived terrain feel less random or confusing.  Which is funny, given Sage’s #5. :)

Okay, I’d love to know what unknown things Gail and Heather and Fran and Gypsy Girl might divulge.  And anyone else, too!  If you’re not those four and you feel like it, leave a comment here that says something about you that many don’t know.

I’m currently on the search for a good book or two on the topic of sexuality and/or sexology.  The discussions of the last few posts have been wonderful, and I’d love to broaden my knowledge on these things, benefitting from folks who have given entire careers to studying and contemplating them.

So…please feel free to offer suggestions.  I’d love to find a book that gives an overview of perspectives on sex and sexuality that have been held through time - maybe something sociological?  anthropological?  Jenell (or anyone else…) - anything from your teaching or studies come to mind?  I’d love the book/s to be current, too, as things even 5 or 10 years old can be based on outdated research.
Once I settle on a book or two, I’ll let you know the titles so that if anyone else is interested in reading them at the same time and discussing them, we can do that too.

I’m still thinking about sexuality and would love to talk more with anyone likewise interested. Specifically, I’d love to talk more about the “about sex” part of it. I was raised as an evangelical Christian, and formed my early views on sex in family and faith communities deeply shaped by that tradition. As a child and adolescent and young adult, I trusted that sex was a special thing that God invented for husbands and wives to share – for procreation, of course, but also for pleasure. Glue was the metaphor used for sex a lot in my childhood – a special kind of glue that keeps marriages together. Having sex outside of marriage makes the stickiness of sex inside marriage less so.

Sex was also compared with the relationship between God and humanity, a gift God has given us to more tangibly experience the ecstasy of union with God’s very self. And as such, something to be protected in the same way relationship with God was to be protected. Sharing sex with multiple partners would be like two-timing (or three or four-timing) God. Shameful and hurtful to God.

I no longer live in religious or evangelical Christian contexts, and so would like to work more consciously through what I think about sex today, as the me of this context. My intuition and experience say it is AND isn’t magic glue. But beyond that, things get fuzzy. How does sex affect relationships? What changes between people when they make love? What are arguments for saving sex for committed relationships and, conversely, for being more sexually free? My hunch is that more clarity on such things could benefit all of us, whether or not we’re religious or sexually active or monogamous or have children with whom we want to talk about such things.

Just popping in to say hello.  My week has been full, and every attempt at putting to (virtual) paper the thoughts I’m eager to explore here has been met with interruption.  So…soon.  In the meantime, I will continue, with the help of equally sleep-deprived N, to try to help dear Elijah stay in his crib when it’s time for sleep.  I think the contraption I sunk $69 on this morning might help.