MAKING ART: MAKING LOVE
redirecting creative & sexual energy
My entire life, I have wasted a lot of creative energy on other people.
Making up fantasies, stories, narratives about them, or us, or our connection. Living in delusion. Participating in magical thinking. Making meaning where there isn’t.
I have been hooked on, obsessed with, head-over-heels in love, in full and complete devotion to every man I’ve ever been with, to the point of self-abandonment. Pouring all of my love into them, and creating our life together, instead of my own. Investing my life force energy into helping them grow, and change - read: trying to change them into who I want them to be, like a piece of clay. And also burning out on trying to shape myself, in order to contort around them and their life, their personality, their wounds.
When I read that last paragraph, all I can think is what fire, what eros, what power —
and how tragically misdirected.
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I long to merge. To lose myself in you. To let go with wild abandon into the flames of desire, and longing, and passion. To be transformed by the little death, the heat of love.
Some people would say this is a part of the human condition. That this is actually just about the God-sized hole inside of each of us.
I would agree that it’s about God. But I think it’s just as much about Love.
But Love does not just live in other people.
Love exists in the body.
In nature.
In music.
In art.
In dance.
In our senses.
In poetry.
In dreams.
Love exists in the moments we choose to participate fully with life. To feel with our whole bodies.
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I used to think of “high sensation” experiences - a quickened heart beat, sinking in my stomach, a pulse in the bowl of my hips - as a sign of love. There surely was a lot of energy in encounters & relationships like this.
But now I know, that high sensation is actually a sign that my attachment system is activated.
As a sensation, Love, - real, authentic, true Love, that we can receive from the pulse of Life itself - feels like a paradox of wholeness and nothingness. Being full and empty at the same time. Slow and deep. Still, even.
It doesn’t feel like grasping, aching, hurting, striving. It’s not based in the thrill of attachment wounding or a tension of an anxious/avoidant dance.
It’s a combination of meeting, and being met.
It’s like having everything and having nothing.
It’s like the body. Full and empty at the same time. A vessel.
It’s like nature. The way the wind the inside of my belly. The way the ocean laps at the space between my thighs. The sun and how it makes my skin burn.
It IS like sex - though this is not the only way we can feel this. How I can have someone inside of me and feel like I’ve dissolved into the void at the same time. How I can penetrate with my eyes, my energy, my invisible aura. Full and empty. In and out. Yin and Yang.
It’s like art. The way a song carves an emotion out of us. We sing, we cry. The way we can be on the dance floor and suddenly we open, something else has taken over, we are moved, possessed. We are held, we are touched, from the inside out.
***
This is all I’m trying to do in this life.
To fill, and be filled.
To empty out, and
feel Love,
be Love,
from the inside out.
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We choose what we merge with. We choose what we make love to with our body.
Or maybe we don’t. I know I am unwinding some serious fawning and freezing patterns in my body. I am learning how to have better discernment about where I channel my energy - with people, and creative practices alike.
But over the last several months, I have really learned how to merge with music.
How to fall in love with a song.
It starts with the breath, how deep the song makes me breathe. How it feels in my throat. How the words feel in my mouth. On my lips. On my tongue. In my heart, in my womb, in my sex. How I can’t get it out of my head. How it touches me inside, how deep it goes. How it opens me. How it expands me. How deeply I can relax when I sing it. How it fills me up, how I fill it up. How much I can surrender my voice into the melody. How it feels in my hands as I strum the guitar, how it feels in my fingers as I tickle the bass. How hard it is. If it’s making me work for it.
I get hooked on, obsessed with, head-over-heels in love, in full and complete devotion to every song I choose to work on.
I pour all of my love into them.
I create our life together.
I invest my life force energy into helping them grow, change
and I shape and contort myself to fit inside of them better.
I hold the tension.
Not giving it all away.
Not abandoning myself.
Not losing myself.
Holding my center.
Letting it come to me.
Until the moment comes
to melt into one.
Fuck yes! 🍓🔥❤️