For those of us who feel…human sometimes:

Rock me to sleep (from Tom Hunter’s album Bits and Pieces)

It’s Saturday. I’m sitting in my new little writing cove, tucked in a corner of our bedroom. Sun is streaming through the window to my right, and the house is quiet. I got about 5 hours of sleep last night and N and Eli both have colds. I’m probably coming down with one too. The house is a mess, toys and burp rags, dust, dirty dishes, laundry, kitchen utensils (E plays with those endlessly), sealed and unsealed mail littering every surface.

But I’ve such a swell of hope inside, such gladness to be alive. I’m coming out of the hardest adjustment phase of a second child - we all are. I’m excited to get back to this computer, however meager and chopped up my hours here are (N’s out with the kids for a little while) - to resume baby steps toward finishing my novel, expanding non-fiction endeavors, dusting off short stories and getting them off to find homes.

And I heard geese today (I think that’s what they were). Their calls came through the bathroom window, cracked to release steam from our un-ventilation into the outside stillness. The world outside was sleeping, blanketed in layers of frost. My sick boy was up on the other side of the door, husband dealing with his varied frustrations, but I heard them. I heard them speak into the sunrise. My bleary eyes and weary bones were caught up in a rush of hope at the sound. That hope flew out the window and joined their brisk formation, coming back happy and cold.

While all of these contrasts swirl around me, every reason to want to get up in the morning and a thousand more to want to stay in bed, I’ll leave you with a quote I read last night, one hand holding a book, the other a baby. It’s from David James Duncan’s book of essays titled My Story as Told By Water:

Our eyes, it has been said, are the windows of our souls. Since the soul is not a literal object but a spiritual one, eyes cannot be the soul’s literal windows. But they are, literally, openings into and out of living human beings. When our eyes are open, they become not one of our many walls but one of our very few doors. The mouth is another such door. Through it we inhale air that is not ownable, air that we share with every being on Earth. And out of our mouths we send words - our personal reshaping of that same communal air.

Seeing, I have come to feel, is the same kind of process as speaking. Through our eyes we inhale light and images we cannot own - light and images shared with every being on earth. And out of our eyes we exhale a light or a darkness that is the spirit in which we perceive. This visual exhalation, this personal energizing and aiming of perception, is the eyes’ speech. It is a shaping, it is something we make, as surely as words are a shaping of air. I feel responsible for my vision. My eye-speech changes the world. Seeing is a blood sport. (p 46)

With unhelpable bouts of negativity along the way, I’d like to try to see my seeing as something I can shape, to let my eye-speech smith a world, among so many other options, where hope peaks out from unexpected places. Where alongside whining toddlers and whining selves there are moments for writing, sun-streaked writing coves, geese in frigid skies, sounding their clumsy-elegant call: See the sun rise. Come: see.

My mom has been in town all week, helping our expanded nest with its transition back to “normalcy”. Normalcy. The word feels shrouded now in a fog so thick, even Fresnans might balk at driving in it. Everything feels new and unknown, like: when will I get a good night’s sleep? Like: how will I keep from pulling out every last hair if it rains all winter (like it did today) and Elijah can’t get outdoor time? Like: did our apartment suddenly shrink with Charlotte’s birth…or was that me actually wishing today that it was even smaller, and there weren’t any walls at all so that I could go pee or get lunch or change my clothes without worrying that Elijah might be “playing” with the baby? Like: how long can an introvert-leaning contemplative go without time to recharge (read: be alone for more than 30-second chunks at a time)?

But I digress. So my mom (god bless her soul) has been here all week (god bless her soul), and we’ve (read: she’s) accomplished tons that I could not have done alone. Our freezer is packed with food. Our tub is clean. The laundry is washed and folded. I decided that this was the week for some clothes-shopping, too, since my wardrobe feels nearly entirely unwearable at this point, and the thought of going shopping on my own with an infant and a 2-year-old makes me want to turn myself inside out. So off we all went to the mall, after the 75-minute diaper-changing-snack-packing-spit-up-wiping-teeth- brushing-tantrum-taming-nursing-burping-diaper-bag-packing-double-stroller- smashing-into-messy-trunk warm-up was accomplished.

It was drizzling out, and this was the time of day Elijah normally spends running around at a park. I had in my head a vision of my mom running around the outdoor parts of the mall with Elijah while I pushed the stroller, indoors, with the baby sleeping in it, to any number of racks of clothes that were made for me, that practically screamed “I was made for the body of Kristin” and flashed same phrase for momentary lapses in my hearing. The dream was as good as real when we pulled into the parking lot.

Between the car and the first store I intended to enter, however, Elijah proceeded to race around so maniacally that it was I who chased him – I who am 31 to my mother’s 57, I who have watched the child long enough to know the dangers he’s capable of barreling himself, wide-smiled, into. I, who had major abdominal surgery 3 weeks ago and am still so pitifully weak from a heart-problemed pregnancy that running hasn’t yet occurred to my atrophied muscles as something sane people do. We reached Macy’s with me thinking: 1) I can’t leave Elijah outdoors with my mom; that wouldn’t be kind, and 2) I’m exhausted and my nerves are fried. The sight of clothing stores makes me want to climb into deep, dark holes on my very best days (nothing ever fits me, everything is too expensive, the cheap stuff sucks, the myriad racks with the myriad options over-stimulate/whelm me), so I knew the outlook of this particular outing wasn’t good. Was actually bad. Quite terribly so.

Elijah immediately tore off down an aisle. I tore off after him. I picked his wriggling body up and carried him back to my mom and the stroller. “He can knock down manikins,” I told my mom. “He can get lost. Are you up for chasing him? Is this a bad idea?” She said she was game. I set him down, his legs egg-beating before touching the ground. The two of them were off and out of sight before I took a breath.

Okay, I thought. Here I am to get some clothes. Let’s do this.

But when I looked up and tried to face all those racks, I couldn’t see any neon signs at all. I couldn’t hear any voices, telling me where to go. None of the unsubtleties of my dream were remotely getting realized. All I could see, in fact, was a blur of light and color through tears streaming down my face. I wanted to run far away, far from the stroller with all the snacks and diaper bags and carseats and babies, far from the racks that blindly hate me, always, far from the rain that had made my feet cold and wet and the sleep-deprivation that made me so raw in the first place. In a blur that needed no tears for its creation, my mom and Elijah passed by. “I can’t do this,” I blubbered to their backs. “I can’t shop.”

And with that, we loaded Eli into his seat and left.

I’m thinking about the experience tonight, laughing, yes. But crying, too. This is a stressful season, a crazy-making season with young kids and their constant needs and not enough sleep or time alone for me. (Or clothes!) I’m looking longingly across the fence at other’s struggles, thinking first, how much I’d rather have something else to struggle with than what I actually have, and wondering next whether that’s just the way of things: people looking across fences, sure that what the next person’s got is much better. Much easier to wrestle with or struggle through – not to mention, of course, the stuff that looks like easy-breezie, or just plain happy living.

Could it be that my primary challenge, my primary pathway toward peace, is to accept the challenges I face as what is my “is” – to somehow, even in the midst of the occasional or constant bout of tears or chafing at my “is”, nestle into it, or at the very least look it in the eye and shake its hand and say, “Here we are. So here, in fact, we are.”

I’m too tired and raw to end with eloquence. Have any of you found peace with the struggles you face? What are some ways you’ve found, or are trying, to find it? I’m ears. Lots of them.

Five years ago, after a five-year period of great internal upheaval - a season of intense questioning of every assumption I had held to that point, theological and otherwise…a season of constant internal and external dialogue, of reading, journalling, crying, raging, praying, thinking - oh, the ceaseless thinking! - I finally went quiet inside. If you’ve never gotten to the other side of an intense kind of struggle, I’m not sure the nature of the quietness I’m talking about can be known through description alone. I think it has to be experienced. It isn’t despair. It isn’t bitterness. It isn’t apathy. It’s a strange kind of coming-to-the-end-of-a-road. You get there and you realize you’ve been running or flailing or crying or self-pitying or raging or crawling or thinking yourself down a path, a path you probably didn’t choose and also couldn’t help yourself traveling once you found yourself on it, and here you are now, at the end. And the end isn’t some grand finale, some palace of gold or terrible awful hell, or a guru waiting to clear up all your confusion. It isn’t a cushy place set up for renewal or a therapist’s chair or a breathtaking view. It doesn’t even have a sign of any kind, no lable, no lentil to walk through to make the end official. The path just sort of peters out, and you find yourself in the middle of unmanicured landscape. Maybe there’s a few trees around, some grass, a couple butterflies. There’s the click of a grasshopper, a breeze. But there you are, and all the things that made you lose your mind along that ordeal, all the things that made the rage and fear and hopelessless and grief and have-to-make-sense-of-things-now so all-consuming don’t seem so pressing anymore. In fact the thought of intentionally pressing into them again only makes your mind stop, and the place where feelings come from close its doors. While for so many years your internal chatter hasn’t ceased, you’re left now with only the sounds of trees.

I think it takes a long time to get to a place like this. Probably the petering out of a path happens gradually, too. And in all honesty, wandering off the end of a path, at least for me, has often wound me up entering it again at some point, or many, thinking to myself, “Wasn’t I through with this one? Huh…”

But these endings. They’re real. I remember sitting with N in that initial quiet season, eating dinners silently. We still loved each other tons, and were glad to be in one another’s company, but very little came to mind to say. Our silence was the end of that road. The buzz of locusts. A faint hint of looking back along what we had just traversed, thinking wordlessly, “What in the world just happened??”

I feel like I’m in a similar kind of quiet these days. It’s different in that I haven’t just been through a painful ordeal. I’ve been writing my book and raising my boy and being a wife and friend and sister and daughter. I’ve been thinking and reading and blogging and paying attention to the worlds inside and around me. But something about everything altogether, about the energy I have to learn and understand, to engage people and ideas meaningfully, to try to be the best me I can be - something about all of it has taken me to one of these endings, and I find myself so quiet. I find myself needing rest. Nourishing food (of the literal variety). Needing not to think.

Can any of you relate? What do you do when you’re in this kind of place?

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.

I’m still mulling so much over from our conversation. Thank you all again! I feel like there’s so much more to explore in all of this, and also, simultaneously, the need to come up for air. Does it feel that way to you?

Maybe some pictures of a trip to a farm that N, Eli and I took last weekend can bring a little more levity. I imagine every one of these could depict the wonder and curiosity and newborn lamb or crazy chickenness of ideas involved in the things we’ve been discussing.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

There are something like 50 rabbit trails from the last conversation that I’d love to pursue. (If you haven’t read the comments from last time, that’s where all the good stuff is.) Where in the world to start??

How about with these two: the sexuality/spirituality connection, and the sexuality/creativity connection. Which, when it all shakes down, means speaking of the spirituality/creativity connection too, then, right? Three for the price of two.

Last time Christy said the second chakra in Kunadlini yoga has to do with sexuality and creativity. Both. She said, “I think it [sexual/creative energy] has something to do with being comfortable taking up space and being seen and being naked - creativity and sex both require a certain amount of self-revelation, and in a lot of ways it’s the same sort of energy.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. The periods in my life where I’ve been most creative and/or most horny (is there no more elegant word for this??) have been the times when my shame has been the smallest. When self-consciousness has fallen away, and I’m not thinking, “Will I look stupid?” or “Will this seem silly?” or “What if I’m wrong?” but rather, “I really, really want to do this!” Thinking probably isn’t the right word to use here, either, because feelings have been much more salient. I’m not thinking, “I really want to do this!” I’m feeling it. And by “do this”, I’m speaking here of more than sex. Writing, painting, dancing, and creating music have all been involved for me.

So to reiterate, I think shame and abandonment to any sort of passion are inversely related.

This feels (!) like a pivot point, to me, for talking about the sexuality/spirituality connection. Spiritually alive people from across religious and non-religious traditions seem to have in common the capacity for abandonment - to wonder, to smallness, to not knowing, to Love. Could it be that spiritual abandonment and sexual abandonment aren’t entirely different things? - that when abandonment blocks (like fear, shame, self-consciousness etc.) are introduced into one’s sexual relationships (fear of what the other thinks of my body or “performance”, of what this act of sex actually means to me or to my partner, of being used, of getting a disease, of getting pregnant) - that when these blocks to abandonment are introduced, our capacity for abandonment more generally takes a hit? Including our abandonment to God or beauty or wonder or whatever other spiritual thing you want to name? (I recognize that I’ve just turned the conversation from sexuality defined broadly - as per some of the comments from the last post - to the actual act of sex. Probably both deserve many rounds of discussion. I wonder whether the point still stands, though, when speaking of sexuality more broadly.)

I wonder whether sex in the context of security (a safe and committed relationship, for example) allows sex, and all the complex vulnerabilities and fears that can be associated with it, to be outside the realm of “things that block abandonment”. And not only this, but actually inside the realm of things that grow one’s capacity for it. Maybe every sort of abandonment block there is - sexual and intellectual and artistic and otherwise - has tremendous implications for the abadonment we experience (or yearn for) spiritually.

What do you think? Are all these things (spirituality, creativity, sexuality) related?

To build on Heather’s comments from last time, I’m thinking life force has a number of flavors–sub-categories, if one dares attach a hierarchical word to it. Like maybe one person has a strong spiritual life force, and another has a strong force of innocence or purity, and another has a remarkable well of anger or grief that is the force behind the things that they do. Maybe some have a commanding presence that begs to be heard, no matter how quietly or gently or infrequently they speak–like Galadriel in the Tolkein books. Maybe some have all of these forces at once. Or more. Maybe all of us have the potential for them but only ever realize one, or a few. Or none.

I’m interested these days in the force that’s connected with sexuality. I’m just coming out of a two-year season of pregnancy and nursing and the intensity of care required for an infant and new toddler, and a couple of months ago I finally realized, consciously, that I felt back to myself. The pre-pregnancy me, with all of her curiosity and love of learning and eagerness to create (music! painting! writing! dance!). And, as you might guess, a sexual life force.

I think sexuality is far more than “having to do with sex”. I haven’t talked or read a lot about this, so I hardly have words for what I mean (those who have, please be free to share your thoughts!). But I think those with a strong sexual force don’t always fit the stereotype of someone looking to get laid. I think they can be people that turn heads, for sure, but not necessarily because their bodies fit the images of beauty pumped out by our entertainment and clothing and cosmetics industries, or because they’re dressed scantily or have cleavage flashing fancy neon lights. I think they can be fat or too thin. I think they can be dressed as monks or nuns. I think they can be clean or truly odorous. They can be wearing clothes from distant pasts.

In other words, I think their sexual life forces can have little to do with externalities, unless by that one means only the way that what’s inside of them interplays with the bodies their life forces inhabit (or the clothing, etc). These are people you can’t help yourself but watch. They’re embodied. Radiantly. Their weight, pound for pound, weighs more than the rest of ours, if that makes sense, as though they’re more real. They laugh and smile a lot, genuinely. They miss very few jokes. If you could paint them with color alone–no lines for legs or arms or faces or waistlines–their colors would be deep, vibrant, rich, bold. Connected with the earth somehow. They’re a lot like my character’s mermaid.

Is there language I don’t know about for exactly what I’m speaking of here??

Of all of the kinds of life force, this, to me, is the one that makes life so worth living. It’s the one that makes falling in love and being in love so euphoric, and what spills into so much else about life, whether you’re in love or not. I think it might even be part of loving the earth, and the deep, tear-producing wonder that comes from watching sunsets or thunderstorms or thousands upon thousands of birds in a cloud of flight. It’s the force that makes you want to make love, or holler on a hilltop, or create some kind of masterpiece. Or burst completely wide open.

Can you tell I’m feeling it right now??

There are seasons in life, maybe lives in their entirety even, when a person cannot help but go under–under the surface above which there is all of this Life, this sexual force, to be lived and played and danced with. But oh, the glory of rising like a whale from the deep, twisting into the wind and sun and air! Taking the feel of all of it in–the scent, the sound, the sight, the sparkle–to carry one through the depths (to which surely one will again return) more gladly. That much more Alive.

One of the things I’m exploring in my novel is life force–that hard-to-define force in all of us that is sort of tied to sexuality, but not entirely. My narrator, a 14-year-old boy, has a dream about a mermaid, in which this captivatingly beautiful, sexually-charged mermaid beckons him toward something terrible and beautiful. He can’t make out what it is, but he knows there is danger there, as well as something more wonderful than he’s ever known.

I think life force is a lot like this mermaid. Not exactly, of course, but in this sense of being charged, and full with potential. People whose life forces are large and strong have been responsible for some of the most beautiful and heinous events in history, some of the most breathtaking artwork and tragic losses, the most sinister plots and unworldly acts of sacrifice and kindness. I think Obama’s life force is strong right now. I think those of the Dixie Chicks are too. Any of us could probably name actors and politicians and musicians and convicts who have followed an inner mermaid’s lead toward their darkness or their light, and indeed found something more terrifying or more beautiful than they could have ever dreamed. Than we could have ever dreamed.

There is a child at one of the parks I frequent who I’ve seen three times now. And every single time I see her, I am struck, almost literally, by the strength of her presence. She’s a sweet girl, short for her age. Maybe four years old. But I swear, her life force extends at least ten feet in every direction. You get the sense that whether she’ll be a typical leader someday or not, she will move mountains. She will stand with her feet as pillars in the ground and no one will break her. She probably won’t have to bully anyone, either, because all you have to do is look into her eyes, or watch her move, and you’ll want to be near her. You’ll want to listen to her, and you’ll find her interests more sparkly and alluring than the next person’s whose interests are virtually the same as hers. I wish you could see this child.

So what do you make of this?–of life force? Do you have other words for it? What factors make some people’s so strong? Are we born with it? I want to understand this better.