Vernalagnia
"Noun: a romantic mood brought on by the budding season after the frosty, freezing, and often sunless months."
Of all my tattoos, I think this one is my favorite.
I got it in 2016. It’s the cover image of one of my favorite books, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
The book begins with our middle-aged protagonist, Janie, returning to Eatonville to be met with cold shoulders and gossiping whispers by everyone in town except for her one old friend, Pheoby.
When Janie finally agrees to tell Pheoby what has happened to her, why she’s back in town alone, and why she seems to have arrived at the kind of peace that only comes after surviving multiple storms, she begins her tale with this origin story. The story that inspired this cover image, the story that inspired my tattoo.
“It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the backyard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. […] The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. […] Oh to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?”
When I first read these words, I was the same age as Janie in this scene. And it was the first book that I can remember reading that depicted a protagonist who not only looked like me, but longed like me. Who openly yearned for love, cared about love, loved love. A girl who understood love as the animating force of life on Earth, and wanted desperately to be a part of it herself.
Janie is a character whose narrative is built around love. It’s love that shapes her journey.
Zadie Smith writes of the novel:
“The story of Janie’s progress through three marriages confronts the reader with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. It is, in the end, a choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it), and lives. […] It’s about the discovery of self in and through another. It implies that even the dark and terrible banality of racism can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being. Goddammit if it doesn’t claim that love sets you free.”
And though I knew nothing of romantic love at sixteen (save for the limerent, obsessive agony of one unrequited crush after another), nothing of how the choices that I would make in love as an adult would shape and reshape my life, I understood Janie. Understood and was understood by her.
I loved Janie because she offered me - in my very white high school, in my very white hometown, in all of my teenage pain of feeling so unchosen and so unwanted - permission to hope for a future in which love would one day set me free, too.
She was just like me. I felt everything she felt. I, too, could not look at a bloom without longing for a bee of my own.
I gifted myself this tattoo when I was thirty-two. Twice the age that I was when Janie and I first met.
I’d just emerged from the aftermath of an abortion and a divorce. I’d lived through the very real consequences of choice in love, and come out on the other side still believing. I’d moved to a new city and started to feel for desire again, after a year and a half of not being touched.
The tattoo was, for me, a call back to my younger self. To Janie’s younger self. To these parts of us both that survived, even as our adult selves were forever changed by relational joy and pain, love and loss.
Even now, as I catch my upper right arm in my reflection, Janie reminds me that love is real in the world. That loving love is a beautiful way to be. That my love of love will always be safe with me.
She reminds me that I’m a daughter of the flower dust.
Today is my solar return. A whole decade since I got that tattoo.
It’s the reawakening and flowering season of the land. These are the days when I most recognize myself. When the time on the clock of the Earth feels most aligned with my internal rhythm. This budding and blooming and renewal. This life.
And it’s the time of year when, more than ever, many of our hearts begin to stir again. To allow space for desire again. To orient toward feeling for love again. If you’re there, you’re not alone. I’m right there with you.
I’m currently living through the longest period in my life without a crush, a love interest, a person I’m seeing, or a partner. My romantic landscape has never been this free and clear for this long.
And in this liberated clarity, I’ve had the space to face truths about how I’ve operated in love and sex in the past. What I do and don’t know about how I actually experience desire. Why it all feels so new now.
Like life is inviting me back to the backyard, back to the pear tree. To discover it all in my body all over again, for the first time.
How many times in my life have I experienced genuine sexual desire? Genuine romantic desire?
I haven’t always been able tell the difference between romantic and platonic attraction. I wrote about that here.
Sometimes I couldn’t feel for what I felt until the other person made their attraction toward me clear. And it led me to, on occasion, feel another person’s desire for me and mistake it as my desire for them.
Sometimes I felt romantic attraction and assumed that it must also mean sexual desire, because I didn’t know that these were distinct from each other.
Sometimes I mistook desire for admiring someone’s way of being. Seeing things in them that I wished I could be, thought I could only ever access through being with a person like them.
Sometimes I responded to someone’s softness with me and thought that it meant desire for them, when it was just the relief of being met with gentleness and attunement.
Sometimes I desired a partner in order to validate a part of my identity that I knew was real but felt required a living, breathing, relational artifact to be made legitimate.
Sometimes I didn’t want another person as much as I wanted to be wanted by them, because of what being wanted by them would allow me to believe about my own worth.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that love wasn’t present in many, if not most, of these relational containers. Love really was there. But the desire, at least on my part, wasn’t clean.
I’m not sure that I know what my clean desire feels like. Desire that is actually just…desire.
So much of what we think is desire is desperation for someone outside of us to trigger our childhood trauma in such a way that we feel like we need them, as we needed our caregivers back then. So we can act out that old story and (hopefully) rewrite it. So much of what we think is attraction is longing for someone to give our inner child what they needed and didn’t receive.
When you’ve moved through enough layers of that grief and tended to that inner child enough, they’re no longer behind the wheel. My inner child isn’t steering my love vehicle anymore. She’s safe in the backseat, enjoying the ride, eating some fruit snacks and singing along to her favorite bops. The way it should be for a child.
I, the adult, am driving now.
And this means that desire will feel different.
Maybe you feel this, too. A recognition that something has changed for you. An inner knowing that tells you that the old ways of dating and relating from your wounds are no longer relevant for you, no longer available in your body. You may mistake it as confusion about what you really want. A question of how you’ll even know that desire is present when it shows up for you.
It’s not going to feel the way that it used to. Like life and death. Like grasping at something to fill a void. It’s going to feel more like calm recognition. With a lot of spaciousness, and a lot of choice.
I want that. I want to know that experience as the me that I am now. I want you to know it as the you that you are now, too.
The evidence that we are co-creating a new reality doesn’t only show up in what we witness or what we build. It’s also present in the liberation of our hearts and our bodies from old romance and sex survival patterns.
It feels good to feel into this collective want. To feel that part of ourselves awake and alive and blooming like the land.
And I can feel it making its way into my life, and yours. This liberated love. Closer and closer.
Something that came up in my recent divination practice is that Spirit wants me to be more open about sex in the work that I share. It felt strange to receive this guidance, because I’m not currently having sex with anyone but myself.
Except…
Sometimes, when I’m having sex with myself, I can feel the energy of this new love that’s approaching. I can feel this energy’s love for me moving through my own hands.
I don’t have a clue about the body in which this energy will arrive. I feel no attachment to it showing up in the form of a particular shape of a human, or even a particular shape of a relationship.
I just know that it’s real, that it exists, and that it wants to feel and be felt by me.
And now that I’ve felt and been felt by that energy…there’s no other kind of sex that I want.
Especially when this energy keeps finding ways to let me know that its arrival in my life in human form is imminent.
A few weeks ago, upon waking in the morning, I was still in that half-awake/half-asleep hypnogogic borderland when I heard, clear as day in my left ear, the sweetest, most beautiful voice. I heard this voice breathing and moaning. Sounds of pleasure. It only lasted for a few seconds. But what a time those few seconds were.
The voice sounded so present, so close to me, that it startled me upright in bed. I glanced around the room. For what I don’t know. For something to explain what I’d just experienced.
A few seconds later, I received these song lyrics:
Hear me/though you see nothing yet/I’m real as it gets/and right here
Feel me/though you see nothing yet/I’m real as it gets/and right here
It’s not the first time that I’ve felt this love’s energy, but it’s the first time that I’ve heard their voice like that. The first time that they’ve gifted me this evidence of their presence. And, as a clairaudient oracle, it only makes sense that they’d show up for me this way, through sound.
It will arrive differently for you, perhaps. In the specific ways that you connect with the unseen. But if you’re opening to desire anew, allow yourself to be surprised by how that energy comes through to confirm that it’s already right there with you.
There’s a part of me that worries that this new experience of desire - unmitigated and alive for its own sake, without a survival task to perform - might feel overwhelming in my body.
Sometimes I feel so much anticipatory excitement for an upcoming experience that, when it actually happens, a part of me fears being overwhelmed by the joy of it. To the point that I have to dissociate a bit. So as to not explode, so as to not short circuit my system.
I wonder if this will be the case when this particular bee comes buzzing around my bloom.
It helps that I’ve developed such a deep and rich pleasure practice with myself.
It helps that I’ve felt the energy of this love in contact with my body through my own hands.
It helps that I’ve practiced allowing myself to have more embodied experiences of my autistic joy in everyday life. Letting myself clap my hands, squeal, cry, jump up and down, fall to my knees.
It’s making me realize that this unmasking will also show up in sex. Unmasked sex(!).
I’m not afraid of new love as much as I recognize that the sensory overwhelm of this depth of unmasked desire might feel intense in a way that makes me want to pull back.
It’s the fear of being overwhelmed by desire and delight to the point where I can no longer even attempt to mask. It’s the question: Am I safe to be that unmasked in that intimate of an environment?
Nothing will compare to the experience of surrendering in my body and receiving this love from someone else’s hands, someone else’s mouth, someone else’s living breath and voice in my ear.
That level of mutual, aligned desire. Not grasping in an attempt to fill a void. Whole people committed to being whole individually, who experience a whole desire for each other and then express that through their bodies.
I don’t know how it will play out. But I do know that it’s the only kind of contact that my system can allow at this point. I’m not available for anything else.
I’ll have this kind of desire, or nothing.
I’m grateful for my growing capacity to be honest with myself about the way that I once clung to romantic relationships that were not aligned for me. The way that I once had porous or nonexistent boundaries in love.
And, also, the way that I have really loved. Really loved and been loved. To the fullest extent of my capacity, and that of my partners. Even when the desire wasn’t clean, the love was real.
One thing I know about myself is that, when love shows up, I give it a fucking go. Even and especially when I know it could change my life.
The difference now is that I’m already living the experience of transforming my own life through love. The love that I am, the love that moves through me in how I move through the world, the love that animates and cradles existence.
It means that I’m not waiting for somebody to come around and change my life by loving me. And the love approaching me is not waiting for me to change their life by loving them.
We’re committed to allowing love to be the baseline of our existence here on the planet. Here to embody the frequency of love. To have that be the foundation of our own lives. And to share that with each other. To create and radiate love-change from that place.
The same love that breathes life into the land. The same love that is stewarding the death of a false world and the (re)birth of the true.
It’s going to feel new for me, and maybe for you. But it’s also going to feel recognizable. Because we already feel it in our bodies. In the way that we know we were born to relate to ourselves and orient toward reality, toward all beings, toward the Earth.
I don’t have a backyard, or a pear tree. But, if you live around my way, you might catch me on a sunny spring afternoon sitting in my joy. In the grass right next to my favorite Monterey Pine by the Lake. Gazing at trees, birds, bees, dogs and their humans passing by. Smiling at butterflies and ladybugs. Gently rocking back and forth, lifting my hands up to feel my fingers playing in the breeze. You might even see me crying as I look at the sunlight shimmering on the water, feel that same sunlight shimmering on my skin.
Don’t mind me. I’m just hanging out with Janie. I’m just in love with love.
I’m just the bloom and the bee in the same body.
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Much love.