Somewhere, I learned to be careful rather than carefree. At some point, I learned to think rather than intuit or feel. Along the way, this girl’s wispy tendrils of wildness went way underground, deep down into the depths of the dark places where she learned to put away her very natural, very powerful, and very threatening erotic nature.
Carefulness is not a helpful strategy for a life well lived.
Thinking is good for many things (math, taxes, logic), yet when it runs the show we feel dead inside.
Living what is natural and organic to the soul is what unfolds a life that both sings and serves.
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Woman’s erotic nature is powerful, yes; but threatening? Only to those who want to control and dominate life. Â
The nature of the Feminine principle is the full cycle of creation, all the way around the circle from creation to destruction. For something new to come, something existing must die. This is threatening to those who want to pretend that they continually feed structures based on perpetual growth, never ending profits, unlimited and unsustainable consumption.
There is no such thing as perpetual growth without eventual decay. We know this in our bones and in our cells. When something grows wildly, feeding on itself to keep growing, it is cancerous and eventually leads to its own death.
We can pretend half of life’s cycle doesn’t exist, yet pretending doesn’t make it go away.
In the same way, we can pretend our erotic nature, our power as women, doesn’t exist. We can hide it away thinking we’re fooling everyone, especially ourselves, but this doesn’t make it go away.
Our erotic nature is nature. It doesn’t disappear; we just keep it down. Or, we share it in a small sliver of the way in which it is meant to be shared. Or we allow it out in acceptable ways – acceptable to those who want to control eros.
Keeping our nature down hurts us all, men and women, for no one is happy, truly happy, when life is being controlled, when our hearts our closed, and when our bodies are seen as objects rather than living, breathing creations.
But, the erotic is not simply for sexual pleasure – it is the force that animates all of life and eventually destroys it as well.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower  Â
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees  Â
Is my destroyer. ~ Dylan Thomas
Destruction eventually happens anyway. We all die. But while we are living, if we tuck our fullness and power away into the dark., the power to create, to love, to voice, to serve, we over and over again destroy our own capacity to be fully alive vibrant beings here to offer to life what we’ve been created to bring forth.
What does it really mean to serve life?
Just as the leaf doesn’t refuse to fall from the tree in autumn, so, too, must we let go of the need to hold on.
To make an offering of your life to life is to live. Â Allowing what you really are to become, to flow, to die…while you are alive, is to serve.
And, by the way, it is here in the allowing that we rediscover and live these wispy tendrils of wildness, this eros and joy.
Image is Tendril: License Some rights reserved by Hamed Saber