The Creativity Journals Part II: the care and feeding of your erotic nature

...and the importance for artists, writers and yes...every person in an intimate relationship...to understand the significance of this

I’m often amazed by how little common sense we have in industrialized societies, what some people call the conformist-consumer societies. It makes sense that this would be the case, given that these societies survive only if we, their citizens, are dependent and reactive, untethered and orphaned from our belonging (see my previous post if you don’t know what I’m talking about). That’s quite deflating to see in print, but accurate nonetheless.

When I sit with couples as a mentor (the word I’ve chosen since stepping away from ‘therapist’, ´mentor´ gives me the room to simply be more of a wise elder, a person who can say what she thinks and feels, within a far more reciprocal relationship of care, while still tending to the important power structure and generative hierarchy), I’m still amazed when I ask the question, “so how do you both tend to the eros within your partnership?” and receive blank stares. And of course this would be the case given what we’ve been told about partnerships––that the good ones are self-sustaining, like the great parthenogenetic mother goddess herself, simply creating mountains of energy out of ‘nothing’. But this question is even more universal, not simply a critical pondering for people in human-to-human partnerships. It’s a critical pondering for us all. And especially for those of us who rely on our creativity, our wellspring of aliveness and imagination, for our livelihood.

First of all, we have to rescue the word eros away from the slender realm of sexuality. Eros, so much larger, is the pulse and thrust, the spark and invitation of possibility, the energy of creation. The fourth god(dess) born after Chaos, Eros is charged with creating form out of the fertile soup that is the Cosmos. Sexual energy is simply one facet of Eros’ realm. So when I ask what is the care and feeding of your erotic nature? I’m not referring to the number of times you have sex, or how often you feel sexy. I’m referring to the care and feeding of something far more fundamental and vast: your generative, creative life force––the extent to which you are available to Eros’ impulse to create form after form after form. How much are you oriented to possibility rather than safety.

So coming back to the question I pose to couples, and to anyone who is endeavoring to draw from their creativity on a regular basis (which should define those in partnership but we have not been taught to see coupling that way)––how do you feed your erotic nature?––becomes a task for them to ponder. As they go about their daily lives the invitation is to pay attention to the ways they each tend, individually, to their erotic nature. Then they’re instructed to take notes on how they manage to feed some of that energy directly and consciously back into their intimate partnership. The discussion of this (by which I mean, simply, introducing the fact of Eros and this exploration of feeding our erotic nature) often takes an entire 90-minute session, because it is such a whopper for most people. It’s just one of the places I could fall down the well of despair if I let myself, that we’ve gotten so far away from the common sense that would have us knowing that anything we expect to be generative needs to be actively fed. 

But then, I should out myself because for reasons I couldn’t tell you I was recently called to start baking sourdough bread. And as many of you probably know, that means tending to a little family of cultures that now live in my fridge waiting to be called on. I have had quite a relationship with these little guys, even finding myself feeling put upon when it turned out that I needed to feed them every other day, and sometimes every day (!!) if I wanted my bread to turn out like it does for all the YouTube bakers I now follow. It’s not hard to find ways to practice what I preach, and also to shine a light on the places where I’ve become just as entitled as the next person. If we’re at all immersed in the dominant culture we’re required to construct many shield walls against the ever-present tractor beam of entitlement and its endless messages that tell us everything is for, and about, us, always (as long as we make sure our AmazonPrime membership is current).

So here it is: how do you feed your erotic nature? How do you feed the wild family of cultures living in the fridge of your psyche, upon whom you call each and every day in order to be your most creative, smart, wise and well self? I will cut to the chase and tell you that I’m willing to bet my own precious sourdough starter that most of us are suffering mightily from a malnourished erotic nature.

Case in point that when asked this question many people will immediately look to their relationship with the strange and utterly un-erotic thing we call self-care. In doing so they might respond, well, I do yoga and barre classes (mountain bike and jiu jitsu) three times a week, I eat a mostly plant-based diet of nutrient-dense foods, I make sure to get at least eight hours of sleep every night, and I sit in sacred tea ceremony twice a month. And above all, I make sure to only think positive thoughts of affirmation and abundance! I’m sure all that has its place (maybe), though I have certainly met many people who are deeply erotically well-nourished who do not do any of those things. But I am not the judge here. There’s no formula for the care and feeding of our erotic nature because it is as unique as each of us, and it morphs over the course of our lives. Perhaps there are basics, like good sleep and some kind of erotically embodied practice (which often is not the thing we call ‘exercise’, but could be…it all depends on who of you is doing it). But beyond that, I’ve been thrilled and delighted to hear of the unique ways people have discovered to feed their erotic nature.

In order to explore this question we have to assess the general level of our aliveness. How alive are you? How available to the world around you, are you? And even before that, which world do you live in, have you immersed yourself in; the world of social media, short attention spans and quick hits and fixes, or the animate and ensouled world of bird migrations, seasons, and lunar cycles? In a society that has entrained us to respond to an exponentially increasing need for quick dopamine fixes here, and numbing agents there, we’re often hard-pressed to remember what actual erotic nourishment looks and feels like. The former drains us almost immediately, crashing us to the ground unceremoniously while simultaneously insisting we come back for more. The latter grows the roots of our belonging even deeper, further implicating us in the goings on of The Grand Ecology. If we indulge in the latter with enough frequency we are inhospitable to the addictive urgings and requirements of a voracious conformist-consumer society. 

And so, to offer a moment from the care and feeding of my own erotic nature, you might want to kick off your shoes and crawl back into bed for maximum benefit…

Photo by Laura Reed

Here in the northern hemisphere it is just Spring. These last few days I’ve been lying in bed in the hour before sunrise, ears pricked to hear the male Robin sing his morning longing out into the cool air in hopes that a female will hear him and think Yes! There he is! If my memory serves me, he usually sings for the first time just before the Spring Equinox. But that came and went, as I laid in bed worrying that perhaps we’ve finally done it, we humans. Perhaps we’d finally disrupted things so perfectly and tragically that even he cannot muster the urge to call out in the clear predawn perfection.

And then, three days ago, it happened! It woke me out of a deep dream about flat tires on a greyhound bus that apparently I was responsible for fixing. I was very appreciative to be rescued from this task because I had a number of angry ticket holders standing there waiting for me to  get my act together. I was just scratching my head as I surveyed the giant deflated tires when out of the ethers came this cheery echo, lilting upward then cascading down again, upward then down and again…over and over as if someone were rubbing his brilliant scarlet belly and he were a jolly Buddha. Louder and louder until I was plucked right out of the dream and plopped back into my cozy bed, the twenty-six pound terrier tucked under the covers quietly breathing, the littlest wolf, Ruby Dragon, sleeping in her bed next to mine, snoring gently, her dream apparently too good to be disrupted by Robin’s morning song.

And there I was, lying under my open window––open in anticipation of just this moment––drinking in the reminder that there is an ancient order to The World, a world I am a part of, a world I love and am in awe of. Tucked in my warm bed, itself a thing that has become a luxury in a world that is unraveling faster than our Ancestors can tend and mend the threadbare fabric, but nonetheless it is true that I am well and warm. And the Robin himself is singing for his mate, singing for the next generation of Robins. Singing a song as old as The World itself. The song that called The World into being.

Like a kind of love making they don’t tell us to expect (because they don’t tell us anything except to be afraid), my whole body came alive. I could feel my erotic tank filling and then overflowing. As if the very energy that sparked the universe into being had lit itself in my own veins. Because it had.

If we know how to feed our erotic nature, it doesn’t take much to overflow the tank. 

The only question is, how do you feed your erotic nature?