Joanna Frueh Home

Blog

Equal pleasures

A list of equal pleasures~

Going to sleep at night

Waking up in the morning

Tea or coffee in the morning

Watering the plants outdoors

A peanut butter cookie and vanilla ice cream at The Cup Cafe in Tucson

The subtlest pressures and resistances of erotic give-and-take

Emotional connection during lovemaking

Walking in a high wind

Smelling star jasmine

Reading

Talking with my girlfriends

I could probably produce a book listing equal pleasures of mine, so I do not intend the items here to be definitive or even to designate categories of pleasures, such as sexual, sensory, or intellectual. At the moment what interests me are differences between equivalents.

While all the pleasures above are equal in the abstract, their value, impact, or intensity changes according to my exact experience of them. Was the cookie warmed up just right and the ice cream softened to a perfect texture? Was the conversation with a friend restrained or halting rather than fluid and forthcoming, which I enjoy more? Was a lover self-involved rather than reciprocating? Reciprocity offers increasing refinements of sensation.

Timeless

1) I was attending a faculty meeting that included professors from throughout the liberal arts, and the pre-meeting banter brought this comment from a male colleague: “When I had a body.”

2) I was dating a man who said he was a mind without a body.

The first comment was made jokingly, the second was made as a self-revelation. Both came from men in their 50s, intellectuals who, from the outside, people would not perceive as physically fit.

The comments surprised me, sadly, when I heard them. Most of the time, they still do. They describe a state of loss or dissociation that verges on the unimaginable.

Do the comments indicate surrender? To nature and the “natural” course of corporeal events? To mental activity as a numbing of the body? To an inability to feel?

I think that people commonly surrender their bodies to the “ravages” of time. Men, women, older, younger. They expect to be ravaged by time.

Last week I happened upon a statement by Herbert Marcuse about the true ravages of time. Marcuse is one of my intellectual heroes, and I hadn’t read the statement in years. Here’s what stays with me, in my own words and interpretation: the concept of time conditions people for submission, for surrender to misery, tedium, and dullness; timelessness is an essential component of pleasure.

How funny!!! I just heard on the television (which I rarely watch) as I’m writing: “Time is always running out.” The result? Stress and urgency.

How I love the timelessness of writing, of playful, fascinating conversation, of making love.

Compulsive, pink

I asked a friend why he was giving what seemed to me like way more than enough time and energy to a project, and he said, in the clipped manner that sometimes made me laugh, “Compulsive.” Both of us laughed in mutual acknowledgment of his “condition”.

Read more

Mistaken identities

I witnessed a fascinating case of mistaken identity. I was the one in error, and for current purposes I’m defining mistaken identity like this: when a person thinks something about someone, often a stranger or a new individual in her life, and finds out, either pronto or down the line that she is WRONG.

Read more

A clearing of congestion

The Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan asserts that congestion causes all illness. Accordingly, illness can be mental or physical congestion, congestions of which a person is aware, such as post-nasal drip, or ones to which she is numb or of which she is ignorant, such as a tightness that has lived in her body for so long that it feels natural or a hatred of someone that feels so right that the hater does not call her heart into question.

Congestion is a lack of space. Space and clarity go hand in hand.

Clarity is a clearing of congestion.

Not driven

Early today over tea I discovered this: I’m not driven anymore.

Professionally I’ve lived in the art world and academia, which harbor highly driven people. Ambition is fine with me. But there’s ambition with generosity and there’s ambition that’s everything-for-me. The latter clangs and screams in the professional worlds with which I’m most familiar: individual status, making a name for oneself, telling others how great you are by touting your publications or exhibitions or speaking engagements, asking your “colleagues” what they’re doing so that you can compare your accomplishments with theirs and come out feeling superior, though you may well end up feeling inferior.

Ambition with generosity produces a desire to help others. Because of whatever success or status has come my way, how might I make the path easier for a younger colleague? What have I learned through and about my intellectual and bodily disciplines and practices that I can give? How do I share what I know and what I continue to learn? Read more

Quandary, clarity

Saturday morning another intense vinyasa workout (see January 14, 2010, Morning/yoga/dance) overjoyed me. Michelle guided us in constant movement from a high lunge at the top of our mats to one at the back, over and over. Then, as on Wednesday, we sank into Goddess Squat, this time with our arms striking straight up and then forward, parallel to the ground. In each of the many repetitions we opened our fists in the outward gesture and closed them as we pulled our hands, fingers up, into the torso. Vocalization increased the exertion and the pleasure: Ha! with every inward action of the arms.

The last week of 2009 into the second week of 2010 found me in an uncharacteristically indecisive place about an aspect of my life. Quandary then clarity then quandary then clarity . . . By the Wednesday evening after the first super-activating vinyasa class clarity was mine!

Read more

Must have been a monk!

During the retreat that I attended last autumn, all one needed to do was to meditate. (See “Gently radical changing 1,” October 18, 2009, and “Gently radical changing 2,” October 19, 2009.) You could keep a non-ticking watch or clock that you brought, but phones and other hand-held devices, along with reading and writing materials had to be turned in–they were kept safe–until the end of the course. Vegetarian food was cooked for meditators and served, buffet style, with much to choose from at breakfast and lunch. Dinner was tea and fruit. You were indeed unto yourself, with your appetites, projections, pains, and pleasures.

I’m such a monk!–and I do identify with monks not nuns–because I loved the gong that signaled meals and wake-up hour, which was 4 a.m., and called us to meditation in the center’s hall. (Lights out at 9:30!)

If in medieval Europe or further centuries and civilizations from my birth and nearer decades prior to it or in cites invisible and inaudible to the human senses energies coalesced that have brought this Joanna into being, more than once those energies materialized as a monk, one who lived in near-silent orders or conditions. At the retreat I loved the silence. Shared silence.

Silence has been one of my natural habitats since childhood, so it came easily. So did the silencing of communication through facial expressions or bodily gestures. Silence guides a person into herself and sustains her solitude among a community of other silent meditators.

Morning/yoga/dance

I usually go to a vinyasa class on Wednesday mornings. Vinyasa is a yoga practice in which asanas, poses, flow together and often feel and look dance-like. Vinyasa combines movement and breathing, both rhythmic, and can be moderately to extremely energetic as it helps a person to develop flexibility, strength, stamina, and cardiovascular fitness. Sweat, elegance, and meditation, the latter possible even during chaturanga, which is a push-up, draw me to vinyasa classes.

Yesterday was especially vigorous and included an asana called, in English, Goddess Squat.

In the pictures below, my stance is Goddess Squat. If I were strictly in the pose, my arms would be symmetrically raised with upper arms parallel to the floor, forearms and hands facing forward, and palms open with fingers spread.

GoddessSquat_head back

GoddessSquat_head to side

In Goddess Squat we shifted to the right and to the left, holding the squat while further increasing its intensity with dynamic arm gestures. We were dancing to a primally exciting audio of drumming and activating a lot of heat.

Our instructor, Michelle, in whose spirited honesty and vulnerability I learn to further love those qualities within myself, laughed as she promised, “We’ll be here a while!”  I felt taxed, and then came a loosening of the mind, a transcendence of Oh, I’m not strong enough physically to continue, to enjoy this. I became stronger, and so did my pleasure. Felt great then and feels great now!

Battleground of beauty

A friend emailed me a photo of her a couple days post-cosmetic surgery and laser resurfacing. Her closed eyes, sores, bruises, bandages, and covered-up hair create, for me, an unidentifiable person. In the text her tone is characteristically spirited and full of humor, as she tells me that the photo was taken before she could open her eyes and that she doesn’t look much different 3 days later. She notes happily that her partner, who presumably took the picture and maybe wrote the email, kissed her. Yay, him! Whose spirit and humor complement hers.

My friend in the photo is the only close friend of mine to undergo selective cosmetic surgery, and we talked a lot about her doing it throughout the process, from her wanting the procedures to her questioning her rationale to her first consultation with the surgeon to her pre- and post-operative medications to her feelings in the late afternoon before the morning when she would enter the hospital. My friend and I were born the same year. She is deeply intelligent and thoughtful, independent, and self-accepting, and as she became clear about proceeding with the surgery, I encouraged her to go ahead with it.

Read more

« Newer Entries  
 Older Entries »
  • legally purchase viagra
  • xalatan best price
  • buy cheap zyprexa
  • diamox
  • zyrtec
  • mobic rx
  • generic online zyrtec
  • discount generic viagra online
  • cialis line order
  •