I miss my early morning company — there are no owls here to accompany me into this early morning writing time. I had strange dreams, and they’ve faded now. My body is still in need of help, but it’s better.
This weekend I started thinking again about offering a sacred sexuality class, a group for women (to begin with) where we can write about the pleasures of the flesh and how exactly holy they feel to us — how much it matters that we are in our desire, that we feel our longing body, that we discover how to allow pleasure to bring us all the way open to another person, and, more importantly, to ourselves.
Right now, it’s hard to think about how to justify such a group, just as it’s been difficult to do a lot of promo for the fundraiser for Sex Still Spoken Here, the Erotic Reading Circle anthology — there are wars and violence all over the world. Israel has invaded Gaza, and hundreds of people are dying. The rebels in the Ukraine are shooting planes out of the sky. The people of Syria are dying in thee hundreds. People are sending their infants and children across international borders, alone, in order that they might be safe and free. The people of Sudan find themselves in the middle of a civil war. Every paper I open is filled with stories about sexual violence and atrocity. How can this be a time to speak about erotic pleasure and investigation, about sexual delight and recovery? Isn’t that the last thing on our minds: our own joy?