Foreplay Can Begin With a Dishtowel!

Men are beginning to understand that doing housework…unprompted goes a long way to creating marital happiness…Intimacy is not just for the bedroom, in other words. Foreplay can begin with a dish towel. —The Toronto Globe and Mail, Quoted in the December ’07 Smithsonian, The Last Page: Domestic Bliss by David Martin

One of the beauties of a blog about wild resiliency is that the subject matter is…huge. One of the challenges of a blog about wild resiliency is discernment; then there is the challenge of visioning and articulating a model of resilience that would frame the field not solely in a human context, but within a cosmological context; one of the challenges of a blog about wild resiliency is language: how to speak simply about things our language does not lend itself to perceiving.
And language can so easily determine what is…perceive-able. How can we even see an idea we cannot yet articulate? How can we call forth a vision of… say thrivability, of a world beyond sustainability, without articulating it in imagery?
So it was that I found myself laughing when I read the introductory paragraph and its closing sentence: “Foreplay can begin with a dishtowel.”
My old male ‘Self in the World’ meets that powerful feminine ‘Ground of Being’; again.
This encounter captures for me some humorous essence of the Second and Third Keystone Processes of Wild Resiliency: there is—A World in Which to Be: Our Ground of Being; and there is the Power of Arrival: A Self in the World. To eliminate either process from our map of human resilience is to ignore the world we call home as a foundational reference, or it is to ignore the power of our own interpretive beliefs and actions as they shape our experience of that world.
And it is precisely out of this juncture of self and world, it is out of the confusion of mistaking our maps of reality for reality… that all of our human traumas arise. Whether we are to speak of global warming or of the war in Iraq… the problem is the same:

We thought we possessed the object of reality… and forgot the dance of foreplay is one of dialog…it takes two. Arrogance is the word I cannot but write here.

And arrogance is but a symptom of the wound, the wound of a world-view imprisoning us within a self-imposed isolation and separation from the world of our belonging. The forbidden knowledge is that we arise out of and are embedded within a world of Oneness in which the duality of the female and male celebrate and make possible the Other. To lessen either…is to demean the other.
To make of one’s enemy something less than one’s brother…is to dehumanize one’s Self. To make of the other than human world‘ an object for our convenience…is to make an object of our Self as well. Hence, our current circumstance; and the Wild Resiliency Assertion: Reciprocity is the Co-Creative Principle of Life.
So let the dance be renewed, and let the Other be honored. Let the Forests be re-storied. Let the Rivers run like Holy Blood. Let the Breath of Life—be celebrated. And let the foreplay…begin.
Let the radical political act of self-love…transform our world.
WR Resource Note: Discovered as I wrote this post: Make Love with the Earth