Blog
Autumn in Tucson–boots
After 12 days out of town as September turned into October, I returned to Tucson to find women wearing knee-high boots. When I left, it was still summer, though daytime highs had dropped from the 100s and nights had cooled into the 70s. In October a temperature as balmy as the low 80s in the afternoon is normal. That’s warm in many locales, definitely not high boot weather, but the season has turned, and while sandals are year-round footwear in Tucson (though not for me when a “wintry” 60 degrees touches my toes), high leather boots, so unnecessary any time in this desert city, are a fashion choice, one that elates me like a fleeting and quicksilver flirtation. My own super-minimalist, black leather, low-heeled, tall boots? Wait until December.
Happiness and pleasure
I once knew a scholar who studied happiness. He did so because he wanted to be happy and was not. The only way to be happy is to practice being happy. Also, being happy is far more beneficial to ourselves and to others than is an intellectual pursuit of happiness, which can leave us obsessed about happiness and even miserable. Misery grows from the desire for happiness as an outcome of its study when that desired outcome does not manifest itself in our lives.
Studying happiness is ineffective. Experiencing it is essential, and experience happens in the body, which cannot be separated from mind. When consciousness or unconsciousness–both mind–connect with something external to the body, from words in a book or a classroom to autumn leaves to the tunes a brother plays on the piano to the blood we see and the pain we feel after tumbling onto pavement from a bicycle to the fur we stroke on the back of a beloved cat–we feel that connection as a sensation in the body. Thus, body and mind are one. The sensation may be obvious, like the softness of an animal’s fur on our fingers, the ache that remains from a fall, or sensation may be so subtle that we are unaware of it unless we have trained ourselves to feel subtle sensations throughout our bodies.
As with pleasure, most people think that happiness is an occasional and discontinuous experience. They’re happy because they win a marathon or it’s their birthday or they’re eating the perfectly ripe peach. Race over, birthday gone, peach eaten and they’re back to the flatness, depression, vague dissatisfaction, or other non-happiness and non-pleasure that is usual for them. They feel pleasure because they’re having an orgasm or sunning themselves at the beach, chatting with a close friend, or landing in a city that enchants them. Orgasm faded away, clouds covering the sun, conversation past, trouble with the taxi driver from the airport, and the pleasure has ended.
In the above examples, I could exchange the happy ones with the pleasurable ones, because, as I experience life and name its components, happiness and pleasure are equivalent terms that describe what can be the ground of living from which one thinks, acts, and speaks, the moment to moment feeling of one’s daily life. Self-study as the observation of sensation, which is observation of the body as mind/the mind as body, takes one into that happy and pleasurable groundedness. Self-study is the practice of happiness.
- October 11, 2009
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 1
Intimacy
Intimacy can be defined as erotic. The erotic can be defined as connection, a loving connection. Do I connect with a man’s body? Is there chemistry between us? Chemistry bonds me to a lover. Chemistry, for me, comes from and generates deep, kindred emotion and a mysterious understanding of another person. I mention chemistry with a man, a lover, and we also can feel chemistry with friends, with strangers we see on the street, with a wonderful class that we’re teaching. Chemistry charges relationships with beauty and fascination. Chemistry is different from lust. Lust may likely not create intimacy.
Intimacy can also be defined as familiarity: I am very familiar with my body; I am familiar with a lover’s body. Many people are not very familiar with their own bodies, even though they say, “I know my own body.” They may know it, but they don’t listen to it. They don’t pay attention to its guidance. Intimacy is a knowing that encompasses feeling, listening, touching, tasting, smelling, and looking lovingly. I mean these literally and figuratively. I know the way to the grocery store in my car, but that’s a different kind of knowing.
- October 10, 2009
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 0
Aphrodite
In case anyone thinks that I’m a devotee of the deity Aphrodite, with pictures or statues of her around my house–uh uh. Although I chose aphrodite as my website email name, dedicated my book Monster/Beauty to that loving and lovely goddess, and collaborated with Russell Dudley on photos of myself after Greek sculptures of her, she is a symbol for me, not anything to which I pray. A figure of beauty, love, creativity, sensuality, and laughter–as she was for the ancient Greek culture which gave birth to her in literature and art.
As such, Aphrodite inspires me, and I celebrate myself by taking her name, as a bride might take the name of her beloved.
Girldrive
I just bought Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism by Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein–not only because Nona writes about me and they include a photo by Emma in which I’m lying on my Dionysian bed. I’ve been excited to travel with them–a road trip into the hearts and thoughts of women, mostly younger, throughout the country. A dream trip full of love and curiosity, the ardor of youthful questioning, and the profundity of all who care about LIVING.
www.girl-drive.com
- October 8, 2009
- Filed under: Bookshelf, art, and media, My work
- Comments 0
Wholehearted
On today’s walk in my neighborhood I heard Janis Joplin’s Piece of My Heart. It was coming from a house where a man on the front porch was doing some physical labor. I’m sure that most of you know the famous lyrics, in which she commands, in desperate pain, that her lover–and implicitly we listeners–take pieces of her heart, little ones. When we give little pieces of our hearts, we likely feel that someone is indeed taking them–pulling them out in an emotionally gruesome extraction. Piece by piece we deaden ourselves, we bloody our love. Both the taker and the one whose heart is being eliminated piece by piece.
The taker receives a heart in pieces, a broken heart and only bits of love, while the one whose heart is violated through bit by bit removal is giving nothing. Both individuals are tortured, and both are torturers. Both exist in an agony of diminishment, a loveless condition–because love (perhaps I should write Love or LOVE) is wholeheartedness. In love/LOVE, a person gives wholeheartedly. A Buddhist would likely call such love, such giving, metta, which is selfless love or love without self-interest. That ideal can serve as guidance for practical applications. Wholeheartedness–it’s a practice.
Playing with boys
I love the boys because they give me pleasure. Sometimes I call you men boys, you husbands, students, lovers, thinkers, friends, and artists, men who I love in the flesh and from a distance that is centuries, cities, blocks, or the vagaries and factual black holes of written history, because I like being playful. I call you boys, flirtatiously and a bit facetiously, because it’s light-hearted, like calling my women friends, who range in age from their 20s into their 70s, girls. (From my performance Why I Love the Boys.)
- October 5, 2009
- Filed under: Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 2
A definition of pleasure
Pleasure is experiential, sensational, and embodied. Pleasure is knowing, in the heart and throughout soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body, the feeling of goodness.
