"What if sex is not about recreation, or procreation, but... concentration?" (quoted from the 1998 movie, "The Opposite of Sex")

I just started an art class last week.  We brought an object to draw on the second day.  I brought a rock that I'm fond of.  I started drawing it. In short time I had drawn the outline.  Hmm.  Very nice.  But apparently I was not done, since only three minutes had passed.  The class is two hours.

I began to add dimension.  Very soon I had it looking like... a potato.

It looked like a potato for a long time.  I despaired!  I said to my classmate seated next to me, "I hate drawing."  I meant it.  This was terribly distressing, to just sit there drawing a rock and ending up with a potato.

So I began to shade, and I began to draw the depth of the rock.  The faces of the rock.  The feel of the rock.  I had to squint to see the distinct spots and lines and variations in color, things that I would normally lump together as "rock."  I had to stop every now and then and just stare at it, absorb it with my eyes, and then go on moving my pencil.  As time went on, I wanted to really know this rock in all its most minute parts, and I felt both excitement and frustration building within me.

I got lost in it.  I even drew its shadow, which was much more complicated and interesting than I would have expected.  Imagine my surprise when a rock came into view on the piece of paper in front of me.  I had actually created a two-dimensional representation of a real rock.  It looked very rockish.  I was stunned and amazed.  The teacher came by and complimented me, and I sensed actual admiration on his part.

I began all over again, drawing the rock from a different angle.  Soon I had two representations of a rock in front of me!  People were congratulating me all over the place!

I realized how much I truly love drawing!

Sex is pretty much the same thing.  Whether with a total stranger or with my mate, I'm doing art.  It's all about concentration.

Early on in my work, I realized that I was going to have to keep learning if I wanted to keep enjoying myself.  There are only so many techniques to learn, and that is not the real stuff anyway.  Between the initial unclothing and the big orgasm at the end, what gets filled in?  This is the part that really turns me on.

Even in casual sex, I don't think orgasms are the major draw.  At least, orgasms in the usual sense.  Arousal, that's where it's at.  Emotional, physical, and spiritual.  Being naked with another human being is a fascinating thing.  I want to really feel them.  In return, I feel more of myself.  I want to really see them.  In return, I see more of myself.  I dive into the physical.  In return, I emerge into the spiritual.

Really focusing on touching that person, drawing them out, being drawn toward them, feeling oneself drawn out as well, that's the good stuff!  All that clasping and touching and feeling and fucking and licking and looking, it's nothing less than the act of creation.

There have been times in my life when I was plain frustrated with the whole process though.  At those times I have said to myself, darn, I hate sex.  Or, darn, I hate the shit that goes along with sex, all the things I don't understand.  I want to just know, now, the ways of drawing what I want to have in front of me.  I don't want to draw potatoes.

Ah, patience.

A couple of years ago when I first felt the impulse to learn how to draw, I sat down and started drawing a table in my apartment.  I hadn't done any drawing in years.  I got frustrated very quickly.  It wasn't such a bad rendition, but it wasn't such a good one either.  To my surprise, I started to cry!  There I was, sitting on my couch, drawing my table on a pad of sketch paper on a beautiful day, and suddenly weeping.  Deeply weeping.

The table had drawn strong emotions out of me!  At that time, I stopped drawing.  I didn't have the patience, then, to keep sitting and drawing until I got it right.  I felt afraid of the emotions of drawing.  Several months passed before I tried again, and eventually I started to get somewhere.

In sex, my curiousity has been so great that I had almost no choice but to keep learning, and learning, and learning.  I had to learn how to not just sit there and cry when what I drew was not what I wanted.   I had to let myself see what it was I couldn't yet see.  I had to let my gaze soften.  I had to let my spirit merge with the object of my concentration, and then pull back in order to reflect what I'd experienced.

In doing so, just as in my art class, I became more and more drawn out of myself.  That's the part I love, being aroused in my entire self.  Being more lively.  My feeling tone is heightened.  I sound, to my inner ears, clearer, more in tune.

And speaking of rocks and tones...

When I was in Texas recently, I went to Big Bend National Park, where I stood in front of a huge rock wall deep in a canyon.  The Rio Grande flowed by my feet.  The sun was setting, and a full moon rose over the rock wall.  Damn beautiful sight, and what made it even finer than your basic beautiful sight was that it came with an echo.  Every sound, little or big, hit the wall... and became alive.

Standing there making all kinds of sounds, tones, chants, yells, cries, whispers, and hearing them dance through the air back at me, I understood the consciousness of rocks in a way I never had before.  I knew that the rocks were barely aware of my body, which wasn't dense enough for them to perceive.  The atoms in me moved too quickly.  I was sort of a blur, even if I was standing still.

However, they were aware of the _sound_ of me.  I swear it, they were.  So I gave them more sounds.  I was surrounded by rocks.  I lay right on top of one and made tones into it.

I felt the rock absorb the sound.  I felt it love the sound.  In its way, the rock was conscious.  Its "language" was sound.

Which, in the most vast and essential part of me, is my language too.  Beyond words or even music or the everyday sounds of life are the sounds of All That Is... breathing itself through me and through all of us and through rocks and water and air...

Seth, in Nature of the Psyche, has this to say about man's true relationship with nature.

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"In early times, consciousness was more mobile... man always knew who he was.  He was so sure of his identity that he did not feel the need to protect it, so that he could expand his awareness in a way now quite foreign to you.

"Man never would have said, 'The water flows through the valley.'
Instead, the sentence would have read something like this: 'Running over the rocks, my water self flows together with others in slippery union.'"

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Which leads me back to those naked bodies.  A good place to end. 

©1999, Mui. Printed in the February 1999 Issue of the online Conscious Creation Journal. (Feel free to duplicate this column for personal use - please include this copyright notice.) http://www.consciouscreation.com/