The Journey - Part One

We sat next to each other, facing the back of the 18:42 to Paddington. He closed his laptop, I stroked a fingertip quickly and lightly across his knuckle. We said "how are you?". He buried his face in my neck and pulled me closer to him, tightly. His hands brushed my back, firm and warm on the bare skin of my arms. Pressing my nose against his neck, unable to get closer, I breathed him in and ran my hand over his jaw, his cheek, and let my lips find their place against the smooth, fine skin in the hollow of his collar bone. For the first and last time. We pulled away, I don't know how it happened, my lips found the tight, pursed pull of his. i started to soften, to let go of the questions, softening into slow, intense waves of purple, pulling in, spreading out again. And just as I stopped pushing and looking for what he wanted and let myself relax and open and be there, just as my breath became sharp and insistent, I inhaled his burning no. Just as my heart started to open and I couldn't breath quickly or deeply enough to hold on, I knew it was over.

Fragments

I remember one night in London in the middle of summer. The heat had been building over a week or two to the point of bursting. London heat is a little tense and gritty. A stillness was filling the evening. The colours in the garden vivid and crisp, the smell of dirty lilac persistent as we ate greasy roast chicken from the rotisserie outside the blue mosque. I remember lying naked on my bed that night, sash window wide open, very little between me and the outside. I didn't sleep until the heat began to drop only to be woken a couple of hours later by what sounded like hot, golden oil sizzling fast. Between sleeping and waking, the air cooled and started stirring, stroking my skin and as the heat broke the sound of hot oil turned into to raindrops falling on leaves I turned from a leaf soaking up raindrops back into myself.

The Hunger

"Your heart is yearning for a man to meet you - that's different from lonely. Lonely you can fix with a cat and a few friends...See me, feel me, come and get me, meet me, be with me, penetrate me, play with me, dance with me... its never-ending by the way... because when you have a man you want more, you always want more because you intuit, as any woman does, that there's more, there's deeper, fuller, there's wider, there's wilder, there's softer, its never ending." Michaela Boehm - The Wild Woman's Way

To hear this as a woman and as a single woman, I feel a quickening in my heart, a lightening, an opening up. This heart yearning is joyful. Our hunger for more, our yearning for intimacy as a natural state of being. Its taken me a long time to learn that no amount of yoga, dieting, self-development, meditation, time with family and friends will ever fill this hunger for intimacy. We don't get to hear this very often. We most probably didn't grow up hearing it either. We learn that sex is not a very noble pursuit for a woman and that we aren't really that sexual anyway. We learn how to be good enough. We learn that we get what we want when we are good enough. We learn that if we don't have what we want we need to be better, (not more, more good). We learn that if we could just be good enough, thin enough, trendy and bendy enough, sexy enough, clever enough, (fill in the blanks), that we will be rewarded with a perfect whatever to complete us.

Allowing ourselves to want, allowing ourselves to surrender to our own desires means letting go and diving in to the vastness of ourselves. It scares us. Jumping off that edge into the felt knowing of our bodies, our longing, our hunger. To let ourselves want, we stop hiding, we stop deferring, we stop denying who we are. Sometimes it takes courage, that hungry heart, to burn through our shame, our not-enoughness, our stories, to get to this place of wildness. And sometimes all it takes is noticing. As women we are wired to feel and be in our bodies and in our desire. We were made to feel pleasure, from the sensitivity of our skin, to strength of our orgasm. Where desire and pleasure meet, something opens up in us that is both hungry and full. A place of "I'm enough as I am" and "I want more". A place of being here and being open. When we can be hungry while being present to our body's experience, there's no grasping and no pushing away, just the felt experience. Its in our bodies, our senses and our sexes that we find hunger and its here also that we find fullness, the fullness of life experienced viscerally in each moment.

So while I'm waiting for this man who can meet me, see me, penetrate me and be with me, its my daily practise to come back to my body and ask myself "what do you want?" again and again and again and again. To keep asking, to stay open, to keep listening. Not because it will get me something or somewhere or make me more loveable. I do it because then I have intimacy with my self and my body and my connection to my body is my connection to life.

Mad Men and Good Girls

"Well try and imagine you're newly-wed, and now you have everything - you're beautiful, you're slim, the beloved prize of a handsome man..." Peggy Olson

Mad Men. The beginning of the descent into the sexual revolution of the late sixties. Mad Men who wrap up products in glossy images and clever copy to create enough desire in women that they buy the product and all its wrapping. The desire to be the object of every man's desire. Beautiful, slim, immaculately dressed and ultimately the perfect, good girl, good wife, good mother. Yet everyone, including the men, is a little frustrated, on edge, hungry. Frustrated with all the veneers of success, frustrated sexually, creatively, emotionally. Mad Men are free act out all their "desires" - smoking, drinking, riding young women around their offices like little boys on ponies. And the women look on, working out how it is they need to be in order to stay in the game. By being hot, available and discreet, by being dutiful and submissive, by being clever and like a man. Betty sums up what was expected of women when she says about her mother:

"She wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man. There's nothing wrong with that. But then what? Just sit and smoke and let it go until you're in a box?"

I love everything about this programme. The way it looks, the writing, the themes, the time its set in, the acting. Most of all, I love watching masculine and feminine stereotypes in the slow, on-going state of meltdown. In Heat Wave, Joanie says something about feeling like Doris Day but wanting to be Kim Novak - "1960 I am so over you". The desire to be more, to want more, to express more of themselves shows up too in Peggy who asks for a pay rise and gets it. She celebrates by going home and putting on her Relaxerciser, a vibrating belt worn like underwear. And Betty discovers her own pleasure as she pushes the shaking washing machine back against the wall and fantasizes about kissing the air conditioning salesman having been told off by her husband for allowing another man into the house. Their desire knows there is more to life than the neatly contained roles that have been created for them.