puppy energy

This is what this morning looks like: deer on the road, a puppy learning heel and gentle, jays at the new bird feeder. Nettle-mint-skullcap tea. A Jen learning to run up and down long flights of stairs, in order to exercise puppy.

We all have puppy energy sometimes.

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There’s still time to sign up for either the 8-week in-person workshops (Write Whole or Declaring Our Erotic) or the  online erotic writing workshop! They begin next week — I’d love to write with you!

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How would you define puppy energy? I think of it as exuberant, bouncy, a little clumsy, too many limbs, a little bull-in-a-china-shop energy — that space where I’m bumping into everything, even in an empty room, where I say things I mean but hadn’t intended to say out loud, when I’m wildly visible, excited about everything, slightly ridiculous, a bit anxious, overly myself.

During our walks, Sophie will sometimes fling herself into the air, pulling at the leash, wanting to run after all the ghosts and smells around her. She stops and the teethes the leash, yanking at what restrains her. I understand this feeling in my bones, and both want to let her run all over this little peninsula until she gets her fill and want to teach her when to run and when to walk calm (like a nice girl, right? Ugh — it gets complicated!)

Puppy energy feels related to new relationship energy, just-in-love energy. It’s “everything’s exciting” energy, “everything’s possible” energy.

I love it when I feel a surge of puppy energy: I feel new, renewed, possible, powerful, competent, joyfully up to all the tasks. These surges last a few hours, maybe a day or so, sometimes a bit longer, and I have learned not to question them, not to undermine them with the knowledge that they are cyclical-temporary (meaning I won’t be feeling this way every second for the rest of my life), not to hound this lovely en-lightening with “when’s it going to end?” wonderings.

I get puppy energy over new friends, new work, new puppies — I get it depending on what’s happening with the hormones in my body. It’s the feeling of a crush on a new author or idea, and I wonder about its relationship to jouissance, the French term used in/around psychoanalysis that has to do with a pleasure that’s just about too much, that fine, fierce, terrible, tremendous line between ecstasy and suffering.

Sometimes it’s nice (nice? what a word) to be overfull, up to the brim with excitement and joy. And then, too, the body needs to rest, to release, so that it can fill again.

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A write for today: when was the last time you or your character felt puppy energy or that “new relationship energy”? How or where did you/they feel it in the body? How did you/they relate to other people (or maybe one particular person)? What did the world look like?

Thanks for the ways and times you allow yourself to expand into your joy and possibility, even when it’s scary. Thanks for your articulations, your words, your words.