I started this journey around the same time I started the DreamLand project, before its roots got lost in my ego and past pains, before I declared my Path to Penthos and started writing for the album and comic book.
I didn't realize though that with all my curiosities about love and God and other humans I knew, I was just seeking a deeper intimacy with myself. Maybe that sounds really narcissistic. But what I mean is, I wanted to fill my true nature fully and all these experiences were windows into what that fullness might feel like.
Right now, as I work on my latest piece "Path to Penthos" and re reading "The Power of Divine Eros: The Illuminaying Force of Love in Everyday Life" by A.H Almaas and Karen Johnson. I am contemplating so much. My relationship to myself, the culture I was born into and the one that was stripped away, my interpersonal and worldly desires, the shedding of my past.
A couple of years ago I asked myself what it was I really desired most and the answer still remains the same "to be loved, fully."
More and more I explore myself to understand what that really means. So with this blog post series (I don't know how long it'll be) I want to share some really raw and tender feelings with my readers. Mostly in the form of poetry or pictures. Inner monologues.
I love a man right now who's name means friend of God. He is so beautiful. He stinks of sun and secrets from a place I can't remember. He doesn't know I love him so deeply. He is so beautiful man. It's terrifying and invigorating and erotic and innocent, all my feelings. All his presence too.
It's inspiring my heart in new ways and also old ones. In the Power do Divine Eros book the authors stress the importance of sitting with our desires without judgment or action. But just letting ourselves feel them in the body, and understanding those feelings. This is such a crucial element of self love to me. I've created such an intimate and erotic relationship with myself through this practice in combination with other ones, like spiritual baths. In loving this man, this Friend of God, I feel brave to revisit The roots of my desires even if they are painful. I plan to start at the roots and end with my eyes on the sun and my mouth full of water.
Here is the first poem of this series;
Untitled , January 30, 2022.
I want to feel more like a human. Less like a machine.
less like a monster, more like a man.
Tall and proud and delicate too.
Warm as the sun , cold as the moon?
Why must I be so rigid, God? Where is my freedom and my will?
A slave to melody and impulse, a slave to the need for feeling.
Some audacious bastard runnin wild, it seems that I’m Earth’s only child.
And where is love? But in the stars
sometimes.
I think in this poem I am saying, I long for freedom. But it feels like I cannot have it. That I am locked up in fleshy and systemic oppressions that I do not understand. Too heavy to fight. But I long to touch a star anyway. Hmm.
I also want to leave with four questions from the first chapter of this book.
How do you experience the selfless giving of love?
How do you experience passionate wanting?
How do you experience the relationship of the two in your life, in your experience?
How do you experience the opposition, fhe conflict or the disharmony between the sweet, giving, "spiritual" love on the one hand and the wanting, the desire, the passion and intensity on the other ?
If you do this alone or with a partner or group please please! Share in the comments below.
Til next time.
Ino, Blue & Casper. 🌷