Last summer I started using my masturbation practice to process some things only to remember a past me also did this, though not in front of a full length mirror with a pile of toys, oils, and lube next to me. It was in ancient times before the pandemic so I’d forgotten all about it. 

One afternoon, a handful of months before time broke, I laid in the bathtub my wife and I had had reenameled, with my knees open, touching myself. The tub and surround were fresh, but the tiles of life we’d spent years diligently assembling together, were coming undone. Our marriage was disintegrating though we were trying to prevent it. We didn’t get married to get divorced, we kept telling each other. 

Though an unusual place for me to do so, I had an orgasm in the tub. Then I sprawled on my bed determined to have another. I would lay there all day if needed, a dildo inside, hands stroking, pressing. My helping spirits had been telling me to “study the sex practices,” and I didn’t know what that meant but figured I’d start by learning how to have more than one orgasm in a sitting. 

I now know that the dildo was a nice size to start with but too small for me to be able to get fuckdrunk on. My experience of urethral sponge stimulation up to that point was happenstance, something that felt great if my sexual encounters lasted long enough, which they rarely did. It would be some months yet before I discovered that, when properly turned on (i.e. the right stimulation for the right amount of time), I could stimulate it and come that way over and over again. 

I moved the too small cock in and out, and pressed the rubberband shaft of my clit and an hour or two later, a cramp in my wrist because I didn’t use vibrators then, the second orgasm cascaded through me. I’d done it! 

But it wasn’t just that my marriage was falling apart. I was also coming to terms with being a childless person. A childless parent, to put a more accurate point on it. I’d had an abortion, a misscarriage, a strong feeling that heavy-handed medical fertility intervention wasn’t where I wanted to put my energy and resources, and one foster kid. I was reinventing myself to myself and my world because I’d never conceived that I would be a person without kids. I had no fallback plan for what to do with the creative energy I’d earmarked for meal planning and school plays. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning how to choose to trust what was so about my life. Letting go of the version of self I’d unconsciously gleaned from society: that the act of rearing children provided the structure for satisfaction and joy for someone with a vulva. 

Resistance to connecting to myself can look like ignoring who I am in my world. And, it can look like a temptation to deny what’s so. But I’ve been trying to choose aligning instead of denying, and riding the horse in the direction it’s running. 

In that bygone time before time broke, I relinquished my parenting plan to Death, grieving that beautiful version of myself and my life into a damp Washington hillside during a 4-night sitting out ceremony in early summer, secluded from other humans but not alone. Elk, Robin, Mosquito, Devil’s Club, helping spirits, and ancestors held vigil as I killed the dream that was not mine to manifest. It rained the entire time. The carpet galaxies of wet forest floor and wallpaper magnitudes of Pacific northwest moss my abode as I played the role of clumsy assassin, returning the dream to the Earth. 

There is no rebellion in life process, in compost becoming soil. Just the trust reach in the order of things towards balance and well-being. Beetles and so-many-leggeds wiggling through the cosmos under spent leaves and exhausted ambitions, night dreams and life intentions. Scooching, chanting, existing, diligently breaking, and just as diligently rebuilding. Aspiring down, and further down still, and lower even until you’re on the way back up again. Silent ancient senses tuned to Earth’s thronging song of wholeness, the treasure map to soil. Ushering from gross to subtle, death back to life. 

It is the out of balance that resists connection and rebels. That pretends, with its eyes closed, that while it can’t see us, we can’t see it. The out of balance for which the Order of Things feels far away, ignorable, unattainable, undesired. That which is disconnected builds false scaffolding and wonky meanings. It is the out of balance that brats what’s so. Life is Teacher and sometimes Teacher is Trickster. And these days it’s easy to forget, because their energy can tend to feel like it thwarts productivity, and even still, takes a while to acquire the taste for, Trickster is not destruction, opposition, or bratting energy, but of relating and scale. 

“Develop the grief muscle. The attuning and noticing muscle,” Trickster says. “And while you’re at it, the return-to-self flex needed to choose both your sunset and sunrise, your midnight and midday, your melody as well as your harmony. And give me everything else. 

“Connecting means being willing to go through the billboard of your life. To discover the life beyond the life you thought possible. Connecting isn’t a savior’s salvation story. And while redemption fancies being tied up once in a while, when the mood strikes, its purpose isn’t to tell the story of goodness or to mark on the map the place where the plot stops. 

“My friend, you are in a mythic nose-to-the-ground tail twitching story. A fur shivering in the slight shift of air story. A snuggled in with a universe yarn. An ears perked kind of tale that doesn’t seek to wrap up because it doesn’t need to. Learn to be like compost and then soil, with the hope of someday being as wise as Worm, as beautiful as Maggot, as elegant as Earwig, as flawless as consenting to falling apart, and as stunning as your reassemblage. Disentangle yourself from the schisms of your world and marvel at the diligence of Centipede, why don’t you. It’s just a much better use of your time than the disengagements, deprivations, and entitlements of separation. 

“You are the push and sprout of spring on the earthen floor. You are like Rock’s curves that allow Stream to snuggle in for an eon or two. Could you ask for a better back drop? I don’t think so. Your thumbs are just right. And your elbows, shins, and big toes just vulnerable enough to inspire you to remain alert and learning. 

“Learn to call out your own name the way you want to hear it from your lovers. Choose rhythm over efficiency because it’s more fun to dance to. And kindness over niceness because you are responsible now, as well as accountable. After your heart breaks enough, what spirally integrity scene would you like to engage in next, my dear?

“Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s the look of reconciliation on her face and the coming and going back to the fountain of forever. Maybe you were born with it. Or maybe it’s the repeated repetition of the things you and your kind know work. Either way, I’m here to urge and invite you towards persistent articulation and rubbernecking curiosity.”

Photo by Sandie Clarke on Unsplash

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