To love this Earth.
This is our great pleasure, our participation, our work:
to restore our awareness of our symbiotic relationship
with nature the most pressing spiritual
and political need of our time.
To be in relation, to everything around us above us, below us,
Earth, sky, bones, blood, flesh is to see the world whole, even
holy.
But the world we frequently surrender
to defies our participation and seduces us
into believing that our only place in nature is a spectator,
onlooker.
Lawrence writes, there exist two great modes of life.
The religious, and the sexual.
Perhaps eroticism is the bridge between the two.
Eroticism, engagement, being in relation:
the inner life is called into play.
No longer numb, we feel the magnetic pull
of our bodies towards something stronger, more vital than simply
ourselves.
Arousal becomes a dance with longing.
And we form a secret partnership with possibility.
What are we afraid of?
Body, Earth, eros, nature, even our own.
When we experience the world as our own body,
writes Suzi Gablik in The Reenactment of Art,
illusions of duality dissolve.
And with them, old assumptions about a distinct and separate
ego self codified by our culture.
The eye becomes the transcendent eye.
Not to indulge, but to engage.
Not to exploit, but to experience.
With a passionate awareness that we embody, where we embody,
both the sorrow and the joy of this world.
Our lack of intimacy with the land.
Even knowing the names of things in the country where
I come from: avocets, black-necked stilts,
white faced ibis, long billed curlews,
black tailed jackrabbit, pronghorn, rattlesnake,
greasewood sage.
In this country, Bighorn sheep, coyote, cougar, javelina,
morning doves, cactus wren, acacia, saguaro.
Knowing the names of things.
Our lack of intimacy with the land
has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other.
Could it be that what we fear most is our capacity to feel?
And so we annihilate symbolically
and physically that which is beautiful, and tender.
Anything that dares us to consider our creative selves.
The erotic world is silenced, reduced
to a collection of objects we can curate and control, be it
a vase, a woman, or wilderness.
Emily Dickinson writes, life is a spell so exquisite, everything
conspires to break it.
Life is a spell so exquisite.
Everything conspires to break it.
How can we not respond?
It is an unspoken hunger we deflect with knives.
One avocado between us.
Cut neatly in half, twisted, and separated
from the large wooden pit.
With the green fleshy boats in hand,
we slice vertical strips from one end to the other.
Vegetable planks.
We smother the avocado with salsa.
Hot chillies at noon in the desert.
We look at each other and smile.
Eating avocados with sharp silver blades,
risking the blood of our tongues repeatedly.