The first time he kissed me, we were in a hot pink glow. Listening to music and lit up by the neon rose light from my car stereo’s faceplate like a couple of teenagers. I’d had my eyes closed, savoring the dulcet sounds of the song we’d put on — for the second time, because it was that kind of song. And when I started to open my eyes, there he was: leaning toward me, this miraculous being with a manbun.
I swear to God: I couldn’t feel my face after that kiss. I had that dizzy, heady feeling when it’s just. that. good. All I remember of my drive home was the sense that I was leaving a trail of myself: shimmering specs of me that had dissolved and were trying to play catch-up as I held onto my steering wheel for dear life, hands at ten and two, part crying, part laughing, saying over and over again to no one and everyone, Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God….
• • •
It was a small bath tub, and the tile was a horrid color of mint green — not the cute kind reminiscent of mint gelato. But it was a bath tub. I grabbed every candle I owned (there weren’t many) and lit them, one by one, placed just so around the tiny bathroom. Lavender, clover, cucumber — and something kind of musky — all wafting up and out the window I had cracked open. I poured myself home-brewed sun tea, put it on ice in a massive mason jar, and made the bath so hot I was sweating. I kept a towel nearby so I could hold my book without soaking hands. I piled my long hair on top of my head, tasting the sweat as it dripped into my mouth, and I watched steam rise from my bare legs, arms and breasts for a solid hour… sipping cold tea, feeling it cool my insides while the rest of me radiated and purred.
• • •
It was New Year’s Eve, and I was home alone. I’d spent the week building an altar: artifacts from my life which held the energy of all I wanted to create more of, honor and surrender to. I sat for long hours, crafting my desires and making sure they were pure reflections of my deepest-held longings. I lit the lanterns, burned the sage, and as time inched toward the tip-over into the new year, I sat bathed in candle light, tears streaming down my face, hands pressed into prayer, whispering Thank you again and again, and Please, and Yes.
I had slipped heavily into meditation until suddenly, I felt light break over and through me, splitting me open at the sternum — I caught my breath, my tears stopped, and for what could have been two or twenty minutes, I felt held both above and within everything around me, suspended, almost without a body, yet — not. Because I could hear my own heartbeat and feel the currents of energy running through every meridian and hair follicle. Like an undulating Northern Lights ballet inside of me, parts of me leaping and gliding, and bending and bowing. And when the feeling subsided, almost as suddenly as it had arrived, I smiled, bowed in thanks, and looked at the time. It had just struck midnight.
• • •
My point is this:
Your Life is paying attention to you.
The seeds of what might be — for better or worse — are pregnant with possibility. And your vibration, catalyzed by your feelings (both generative and degenerative), draws to you more of what you already are.
You want your life to be attracted to the version of yourself you want to be. The You you are capable of being. The You whom you imagine when you imagine what life will feel like when you finally have “it” — whatever “it” is.
But I warn you: “it” is not a thing we can ever truly possess. Because as soon as we have “it,” we want again, and again. This is the nature of longing — to be constantly reaching toward who we are, like a plant toward the Light. Longing is what draws us into openness.
Because then, we can experience the true gift of Presence: the suppleness of receiving the pleasure already here, and right now. Access to this very real bliss asks for the kind of receptivity we remember when we are in the senses, in the body, awake in the skin and anticipating rapture.
Most purely, I believe, pleasure is the recovery of our experience of True Essence — the undulating sense that we are Light, we are bliss, we are the sweet ache that accompanies any true surrender into opening.
We have to remember pleasure, and create it, moment by moment. How can Pleasure find you if you’ve made no home for her?
Open yourself and see: you are blooming to know her.
