Tongue and Touch

All day cutting branches and trimming trees causes my arms to tremble. It has not rained but the watering ban is finished. Watering now is a rescue mission to revive what is left of summer. The work feels good. I am good.

But I heard the lake call today. When I'm there, its currents of knowing sway me as they carry me through cycles of wounding and healing. Swimming in her reminds me that I am free – free to seek pleasure, to claim my intimacy with the world and free to embody a generative and loving soul. I think liberation can take many forms. But my sensuality is connected to my sense of individual freedom. Knowing this now may matter.

To engage one's world through the body is to know things through the tongue and touch and skin. It is to understand that the world's limits constrict my empowerment, my emotional integrity, and my erotic innocence.

I taste poetry. My hips move through the music of Beloved's attention. Touching the sea is to feel God everywhere.

This is what I mean by magic.

What would it be like to know the touch of an openhearted lover? To move with grace and power like the way of a river? To savor summer long on the tongue, fresh basil, feta and vine-ripe tomatoes? It is to revel in the tactile, beloved. It is to know things I couldn't know before.

Maybe my body aches because it was cut off from the freedom to be worshiped and to worship accordingly – on my knees, face skyward, grounding in your gaze.

Shadows reach around tree trunks, cooling the air of late afternoon. The sun sinks sooner and breaks free of night a little later. October is in the air and thusly, desire tethered. That's okay. I will move as I must to the music. I will taste the poor imitation of complete surrender. I will mange the world's restrictions on my autonomy. For to be a woman means the understanding that I can be reborn at the water's edge – each new cycle birthing another flow of freedom.