How do you like to make love?

Oh my soul
How I do love you
Yet at times too it seems
I am such a novice
Learning yet how to even court
How to hold you close
Holding hands in comfort
And in delight as lovers do
Walking with Spirit too
Alive and Awake
In heart and mind—in-bodied
Asking—No living in the one question
How do you like to make love

“Your most ancient human task is to recover everything that makes you whole, to find your soul, to discover your demon. This means discovering where that demon is and then processing its uncanny energies.” — The Shaman’s Body, Arnold Mindell

Reflections:
This piece emerges in the days surrounding my 70th birthday. How is it possible that it can take so long to learn to truly love one’s self? Yet for me too, in honesty as the poem speaks to, I still feel like a novice on this journey.
Yet it was on my birthday, with a small gathering of friends, that I felt for the first time I remember the feeling of what it is—and can be—to feel personally celebrated within a community of one’s belonging. Tears came to my eyes as I recognized an ancient primal need awaken into a new level of consciousness as it was met—this need to feel deeply and wholly (holy) seen and celebrated within community.

I can only wonder what it would be to live within a community grounded in such a valuing of life. Where each of us feels rooted in such innate worth of being. The ancient remembrance and knowledge of such times yet lives in our cellular structures where the reciprocity of nature’s intelligence and wisdom unconsciously resides. Cultivating a conscious love and sacred honoring of the wild and natural world is, I believe, the primary pathway and practice toward the restoration of this birthright.

What most of our families and the fragmenting culture at large cannot give us, we can learn to give ourselves. And through the attraction of symbiotic relationships, this gifting of the capacity to see and know the sacred in ourselves and in each and every other…can transform our world.

This transformational capacity is rooted in our courageous capacity to bring love and compassion to the wholeness of our own being, to the light and the dark living within.

And finally, this piece is not complete without an acknowledgement of the deep gratitude I live in and that transforms me: for family and friends that see and love me, for the trees that breathe me, the rivers and springs that flow in my blood, the fires that burn in my passions and loves and cares, the winds that inspire and the earth and soil into which I find my rooting, for Deer and Elk and Bear and Eagle and Owl and Raven and Serpent and Toad and all that remain unnamed…; you awaken my soul and spirit to love.