This spring I sat in a meadow for a few days watching and listening to the birds and the bees.  As my personality struggled to just be in the flow of things, the bees seemed perfectly relaxed in their buzz.  While my mind rushed to fill the emptiness with chaotic thoughts, the birds clearly and sweetly brought melody to the void.  I watched from the level of my soul.  Here is life, I felt.

Eros isn’t what you think, nor what I think either.  The birds and bees teach me that eros cannot be thought; it is rather the life force being felt.  I have long wondered why people use the phrase ‘the birds and the bees’ as a reference to speaking with kids about sex.  Sitting in the meadow I got it:  The birds and the bees are wildly erotic because they are literally wildly alive.  It’s difficult to conceptualize and speak to such forces in any form other than poetry.  

The ‘birds and the bees’ comprise a delightful, short poem.  They reveal the constant folding and unfolding of the life force.  We are made of eros, motivated by eros, and there is no escape from eros.  To dance in it is as painful as it is beautiful because we think:  We think we can and must control it.  I think perhaps I can define and speak about it.  Yet, it took me three days of sitting with the birds and the bees before it was given to me to dance.  It took that long to be genuinely called out of my head and into the living song of the meadow, to move my body in its own poetry.  Apparently eros also cannot be rushed.

The dance of eros often has very little to do with sex, yet it is also the source point for sexuality.  I worry speaking about it here that I’m getting swept up in an obsession with sexuality.  I worry that you think this.  Perhaps I am, and yet it’s repeatedly called through me to consciously engage.  I find it important to acknowledge this often shamed, hidden, and enlivening force. This summer I had the privilege of teaching the “Go F—Yourself Workshop,” in which we explored sexual energy within our own bodies and movement.  It was delightfully simple, the most potent result being a genuine sharing of love for ourselves, together.  I taught another workshop, one of dancing together through contact improvisation naked, at The Field Festival in the Netherlands.  It was entitled “The Art of Innocence.”  We were like five year olds basking in a simple eros, but the experience was not particularly sexual.  A number of participants commented that it was life changing to experience this.

For better and worse my leadership often emerges from what longs to be healed in me.  I’ve  noted my own shame in speaking to erotic energy and imagery again and again.  It’s helpful to me just to speak to that, and I hope that my voice may open space for resonant healing (and play) in our collective field of consciousness.  I also hope that in conversations with my teenage son about the ‘birds and the bees’ I’m able to impart something alive, poetic, and free. 

I’ll be calling very soon for a focus group of facilitators—people who hold or are interested in holding conscious embodied spaces—who wish to dive into the principles of BraveSpace.  See the principles here, including Eros.