June 2024
Sometimes we make each others dreams happen and June has been a bit like that. A few things have happened this month that feel like they were imagined into being. I love how a thought turns into a good idea sometimes. I know in embodiment and mindfulness circles the mind gets a bad rap generally, & having a creative hothouse for a head is both blessing and a curse, there’s never an uninterrupted lunch.
Taking The Sex Lectures to Berlin was one of those dreams and being part of Seani Wild Love and Stefanie O'Connor's Taboo Fest was a real honour. Hosting The Sex Lectures and a workshop barefoot in a tent in a field was a first. Listening to Dorte Holbek, Steve Shiva, Stefanie, Kirstine Weaver, Bear Phillips and Mistress Psyche, range around the topics of taboo, risk and potential for freedom & wonder. How dangerous this stuff is, making activists of us all, activists for love, connection and kindness.
Back at Mandala, aka the house we’re all building, has been full of the good folx taking refuge, doing work, being on holiday, joining Evolve. There was a naked moment on the beach with Lex Ryder, Jem Ayres, Clare Downie, Pen Élopée and Adam Bauer that felt like a brilliant moment of hopes fulfilled. The mantra singer I met ten years ago on a beach in Thailand, materialised in Arillas, offering devotional singing with Lieke Wouters in a private concert at Mandala and a more public offering at Soundgarden. Extraordinary Artemisia de Vine has just departed, offering her unique and specialist take on The Erotic Mind, being looked after by stars and nymphs as the earthly things rearranged themselves. We also had Inga Kaskelyte, cranio-sacral healer staying, so the therapy space is inaugurated. Anne K Scott is here, Verity Harrison and Amelie made a brief and welcome visit and Zinzi and Laura Marianne Pickerill on the way. Though today I have a rare moment of quiet and the house to myself, time to get out the secateurs and rationalise the excess of plant milks.
Dreams have a timeline & I sense the difference between dreams and destiny. Mandala chose me, I still don’t know why. Yet being a chess piece of Greek gods is so far a wonderful thing. I’m imagining them laughing up there while I’m scratching my head down here in the right place, right time square. Where I continue to shrug and ask. "Would you be willing?", as friends fold laundry, bring & share food, decorate the olive press, burn charcoal & gopal, make beds, light candles, sing mantras, make other new friends, meeting at the beach as the circles of love widen and multiply. And it’s also about paying 3 years of water bills, getting the car serviced, watering and weeding. And endless laundry. The mundane and sublime taking it in turns in the carousel of life.
Either way, it’s paradise.
Evolve was such a pleasure. To sit in amongst olives trees in Soundgarden for a week to go through a process of feeling & expressing what our hearts want to create next is a beautiful privilege. While there’s no need to work out the how just yet, I heard the words “create beauty in paragraphs”. I hosted a dinner with the theme “Pleasure is Enough,’ asking if pleasure can be a guide to decision making from the heart. It feels permissive and offers direction, I got to wonder aloud where conscious sexuality work helps; when the world looks like it’s going to hell in a handcart and we think we’re in the Age of Aquarius, is it just an indulgence? I have no answers to the ruminating.
During Evolve I was struck again by how I keep my head below the parapet with my writing and it’s becoming time to change that, to share the complexity, struggle & potential beauty of intimacy. Or maybe writing is just another timeline and I wait with patience to be shown the way.
I’ll finish this report from Greco with a quote by Maria Popova, “A person is not a potted plant of predetermined personality but a garden abloom with the consequences of chance and choice that have made them who they are, resting upon an immense seed vault of dormant potentialities. At any given moment, any seed can sprout — whether by conscious cultivation or the tectonic tilling of some great upheaval or the composting of old habits and patterns of behavior that fertilize a new way of being. Nothing saves us from the tragedy of ossifying more surely than a devotion to regularly turning over the soil of personhood so that new expressions of the soul can come abloom.”
