Erotic Arousings
"Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.” Audre Lorde
For me, eroticism is intrinsic to relationship. Much of the time it feels too vast to even try and point at with words. For all their beauty (and my love for the written language), words inevitably reduce. Not because of an inadequacy, rather because life is constantly shifting and shaping.
The erotic wrapping of Life’s tendrils around me and within me conjures tantalizations of delicious, painful, heart-rending, subtle, breath-racing & -taking magnitudes.
The mattering forces of the seen and unseen relentlessly contort the world. Contort as “twisting together” in a life-giving and death-bringing embrace. Hybridizations flourish in the exchange of sensual longings that stretch out like the yawning spine of a cat across landscapes of form and formlessness.
Creation and destruction are lovers that dance to cosmic and chthonic rhythms whose collaborative compositions lead to worldings and unworldings. Terra-scapes and cosmo-scapes filled with porous bodies and permeable fields that conjure transformations and adaptations where shapes are born from the rigorous thrum of Mystery's anarchic womb.
How else could the exquisite shape of each of us and all current manner of life be here? The absence of life-forms and life-ways makes our presence possible, just as the rapid decline of life-forms and life-ways challenges our cellular ongoing-ness.
The inevitability of the next question seems apparent to my own life: How, in every moment, can I make love with the world?
How can I let myself be tentacularly gripped by the paradox of being alive? The mystery that I exist and am of these times, and in that way, for these times. Not because the nature of my species has an ultra-special kind of creative capacity. Rather, that my erotic kinship with the world articulates a nuanced expression of its current shape.
That my life springs from all life, present and prior, means that the seed of creativity that enables my shape is the same dreaming force that springs from the singing body of the Earth. In this way I share imaginative capacities with other more-than-human kin.
Diverse incantations seduce my supple and soft-bellied nature, and inspire pregnant possibilities. From every guttural cry to every raspy bark; from every down-turned wing beat to the undetectable crawl of root systems horizontally stretching; from every pile of scat filled with fur and berry to the putrid smell of decaying kills; from every dying star whose light incinerates unknown planets to black holes towing celestial bodies toward an unknowable threshold.
The multiplicitous orchestration of existence articulates a distributed consciousness that disturbs my well-worn narratives, and I can’t help but feel aroused by the confluencing intelligences propagated through Creation’s entangled emergence.