Dear reader,
Happy December.
I am in love with the subtlety of autumn in Texas – the burnt orange and mustard yellow leaves, the prairie grasses brittle and dramatic, the sky wide as always, and so often blue. All summer, the sun was abrasive and merciless. Now it is a warm hand on a cold cheek. I am grateful for this season of feeling. Even in its lows.
I’ve written about the senses as a portal to presence, but I’m starting to understand that they’re also a portal to pleasure. I’m not sure if I’ve ever, due to a whole slew of cultural inheritances, taken pleasure seriously. Or maybe the better word is consciously.
In an iconic essay, Audre Lorde writes about the erotic. She wouldn’t limit the erotic to the bedroom. She might instead define it as the drive to inhabit our whole self, our body’s wisdom, and our love. “We are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex,” she writes. “And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do.”
I know disaffection. It is a floating head, detached from a body. It is going through motions out of habit, not purpose. It is a growing frustration at all the ways we are asked to change, to shrink, or to quiet our intuition.
But pleasure - or what Audre Lorde would call the erotic - is the “capacity for joy.”
After a summer day of wakeboarding, Joe came home and his eyes shone, ecstatic. In the cool lake water, he lifted his body onto the board, felt his arms activate against the cable, legs bend and surf. He felt alive. Elated. Aligned. “This is what my body needs,” he said - with assurance, but also longing.
I understood from the deep, kindred knowing of my own body. While wakeboarding might not be my portal to pleasure, river kayaking is. So is the ecstasy of dancing, even like a fool, feeling the music sync with my heart and the chills run down my arms. My body needs slower pleasures, too. A walk in the woods, earth soft beneath feet, light shimmering between leaves. Closing the eyes to notice the sounds and smells of morning, the breath in my belly and my lungs.
“Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism,” Adrienne Marie Brown wrote in her book Pleasure Activism - on pleasure as a liberating force against oppression. “Pleasure is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.”
Often we close ourselves off to pleasure out of decency, guilt, or embarrassment. What would happen if we stopped? If we allowed ourselves - and each other - pleasure?
Until next time,
With love,
A
www.annaadami.com
IG: @aadami_writing