A full year later and I eagerly ran away, to a state college located six-hundred miles north, hoping to escape the previous twelve years spent growing in the same mid-sized, North County town. With this change, I was forced to come, face-to-face, with some of my deep-seeded insecurities. Unfortunately, rather than confronting my fears head on, I crawled into a suffocating anger. For four years, I stubbornly clung to some resentful fabrication about my first, sexual experience. As a result, I refused to try my hand at intimacy another time. For four, long years, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, I refrained from having sex. I bottled up my animal sexuality and I refused to express my honest feelings, even when doing so would have brought about much less suffering.
My suppressed biology could only stay hidden for so long, however. Like a mad scientist, I returned to sex with a dry, theoretical approach. "It's a biological need," I reasoned. So, I took it when I needed it. I had no desire to know my momentary partner's thoughts, let alone his (and, in a few cases, her) feelings. Thus, for years, my sexually intimate dances with men merely looked like using. Or, I approached attraction from a mind-centered and intellectual viewpoint. I avoided the places where, and the bodies with who, I felt an animal stirring. I ignored the ancient pulsing that had once melodically swooped me up in in its rhythmic grasp. Instead, I tried to reason my way into relation-ship.
By the tender age of twenty-five, I was a college graduate and a world traveler. I was unapologetically comfortable independent and cruising. I was unafraid of landing penniless in foreign lands. I sought the exotic lilt of tongues in other climes and I savored the endless adventures of arriving, alone and unknowing, unto the streets of Johannesburg, Salzburg, Guadalajara, Columbo and more. Life didn't scare me. But deep, emotional intimacy with men did.
Upon my return to the backyard of my upbringing, I knew I had to confront my ego's desire for controlling an outcome and, thus, maintaining the illusion (that love was all about my receiving attention and immediate gratification, for example) I had spent years living within. Finally, the time had come to walk across the burning coals of rejection. Rather than trying to kiss lots of frogs in an attempt at discovering where a true meeting in the middle could take place, I immediately deposited my unfertilized seeds into barren soil. I held monogamy in a vice grip because, my mind reasoned, "Love isn't easy." I strangled spontaneity with my force and I neglected the expansion that is the nucleus to which two, willing participants continually choose to meet back in the middle of. My refusal to let go has continually produced not the blooms of compassion and acceptance that I seek but, merely, the rocky road that I have always known.
Finally, it has taken me half a lifetime to reclaim what was once lost. The animal in my sexuality. The connection to that pulsating continuum that is our shared humanity. The honest honoring that my primal nature, my soul spirit, and my insightful wisdom are all divine manifestations of the One and that I can be met ~ here, now.
