Lightly, Child

Voice notes from a friend this week had her lamenting that she's been wanting to be sluttier for years, but she keeps ending up in deep partnerships.

Always, I have clients lamenting that they've wanted to be in partnerships for years, but don't want to be slutty.

It's not the old kind of not wanting to be slutty, not a moral kind, per-se, it's that these women want to reserve their hearts and bodies for what is most aligned. They've heard that their heart and their sensuality are imprinted with men's energy, that they must be wise and thoughtful about what they let in so close.

Yet this often keeps them out of the lightness and ease and sovereignty which aligned partnership actually feels like.

It's no surprise to me that my slutty friend has a hard time *not* finding depth and alignment, like it's no surprise to me to hear that people who worked together for years found themselves in happy marriage. Few modern structures give us the time and ease required to live into compatibility, especially when we don't have abundant templates for compatibility-based connections.

It's no surprise that people who yearn for, practice reserve for and work on deep partnership go on yearning for it. Their whole practice of partnership is a practice of yearning, a practice of treating it like a faraway game-changing thing. There is no lightness or ease, there is an urgent question, "is this going somewhere?" there is an impatience, "I don't want to waste time."

Since my partnership dissolved a little over two years ago, I've been practicing partnership as a here-and-now matter. I have it in every fractal, so I am light with it in my sex life. I have it many ways in and through my love life, sensual practices, sexual openness, and I also have it in a way that is quite sexually reserved, actually. My physical boundaries have little to do with the depth of connection we can achieve together.

I practice lightness in every aspect of love, I give my WHOLE HEART in each fractal of love, exactly as wholeness looks. It's like the river stones, like the plants—all sized and shaped differently, all whole as what they are.

How weird would the river be with all same-sized stones, how improbable for it to have only one stone, how natural for me to linger with my favorite stones, collect them all together, how strange to pitch ones I dislike hatefully back to the flow.

What is “a relationship?” Please, will someone tell me what that means? "I am in a relationship now." WHAT on earth does it mean? Can I touch it? Is it in the room with us now? What was there before it? Do you really believe you're only in this one? What makes this one so different from all the others?

As we move away from the VERY recent ancestral grief that was women's engineered economic dependence upon men, it’s time to rethink what relationship even means. What is partnership for? What is marriage for? What do we want to expect out of marriage and partnership?

Without a rigidly-enforced religious or economic context, what is the role of this rigid dyad? Without the interdictions of a rigid dyad, what intimacies naturally arise, what compatibilities align me with who and how?

Two years without a rigid dyad, I've had three domestic partnerships and a work husband, multiple lovers and platonic bedmates, familial relationships as auntie and alloparent, and a LOT of acquaintances, some of which flourished and died, some of which will always be a light friendly familiarity, some of which feel to be biding their time to develop into more.

All of this on top of my existing structures of family and friends on the east coast and around the world, and my clients and audience in my work.

I did not set out to build community, nor to build relationships, especially not a romantic dyad or sacred union. I related and allowed the relating to inform the relating. I called EVERY man my husband and received of his provision (or I didn't call him at all). I applied vigorous values and relentless personal responsibility and integrity, because that is genuinely who I want to be in the world NOT because people would hopefully like it.

(Often people do not like it or do not understand it. As often as not my empowerment lands as a harshness, my integrity as superiority, my values as judgments. This is the repulsion aspect of manifestation, that I am directly unappealing to what is not aligned for me. I am as happy to be perceived this way as any other way. Trust me, you could never be as disgusted with me as I have been.)

I practiced the sacred union within me and in my relationship to the world, which as my new wifey just pointed out means in every human relationship, individually, in my life.

There is no community. There is no world. There is no partnership, no marriage, no "being in a relationship."

There is me and you, here and now. Me and room, me and forest, me and river, me and dog. Me and food, me and ball, me and housemate. Me and ground, me and gravity, me and me and me and me and my body and my thoughts and my sensations and my ability to somehow take an observer role in this? Or more than one? Me and WHO??

EVERYTHING is relationship.

I am skilled in relationship; the world is my oyster.