Making love with the world.👅

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Making love with the world.

A friend once described herself to me using an interesting word: life-fucker. Besides being a raw expression of her energy for life, it also reminds me of a phrase that has popped into my mind several times: “make love with the world”. It’s quite an attractive idea to this nerdy guy with an unusual romantic aspiration. Let me fondle with it a bit more.

From Mother Earth to the Nu Gua goddess in Chinese, many cultures have long projected feminine quality to the greater surrounding. One of the most important questions anyone can ever ask is “What is my relationship with the world?” Would you want to be a dear friend, a child calling “Mother Earth” or a parent taking care of a rebellious teen like the anthropologist Mary Kate Bateson quipped?

How about a lover, wanting to make love with the world in her full sensuality and hidden nakedness? Holding and cuddling her with your nimble mind and soft body? Penetrating her with your insights and questions?

For those unsure of your own prowess, remember that it’s not only you who want to make love with the world. The world too is longing for you to know her, to come inside her. Yes, that stunningly vibrant world, lustrous, moist and welcoming. You cannot go straight to the hot spots though… you must slowly arouse her aliveness by your imagination, pique her desire by your tingling questions.

Penetrating questions

A personality website said I had a “penetrating insight”. Yes, that’s right, you dirty mind: you can turn a nerd on by terribly suggestive words like that, heh 😝. Once in a while, nerds like me get intellectually horny, where the desire to know permeates our mind, arouses our body, urges us to thrust into the openings of the world with our hardened questions. Ooh, Ahagasm.

In my work as a guide and a life coach now, I often get to taste the sweetness of a good question: done right, it can be more pleasurable than the most physically intimate acts. It can continue to sing inside you for days, filling you with echoing vibrations. A good question asked at the opportune moment, like a firm massage on the sore spot, can release tension and flood you with pleasure. The tenser, the more pleased.

The way you do it matters too. For instance, when you are down, you wouldn’t want someone to come at you “TELL ME WHAT’S WRONG?”. You may respond better to Mary Oliver’s gentle and intimate inquiry: “tell me your despair, and I will tell you mine”

Let’s bring this to a one-to-one context. Remember the last time someone asked you a profound personal question like the one above. Was it painful, pleasurable, or both? Did it feel like to being undressed or having your clothes stripped away? As if you were embracing something warmly tough or being tentatively penetrated?

Intimacy is scary and exciting isn’t it? Just like the usual penetration, perhaps even more. I once asked my American college friend: how is this that you can let someone into you physically but not emotionally? That you can wrap yourself around another body but not another heart?

I didn’t get it then, and now I starting to see why most people are afraid of letting someone else in. It’s vulnerable to be seen and felt from the inside. It’s like bringing your date to your house and discover a dead mouse on the bed: lots of shame, fear and guilt. It helps to remember that there are people who just want to get to know you. They too are scared of hurting you, of doing it wrong, of being incompetent… Or they are simply too excited, in which case you may want to pick wisely, but also loosen yourself and relax. Let them in.

In getting to know each other, some go from the heart to the genital. Others go for the reverse. Some only stay at the head. You can guess which type I am, given that you are reading this libido-sublimated piece… Thanks goodness I’ve evolved.

Becoming intellectually promiscuous.

Speaking of evolution, it may surprise you that this young man has grown to become a lot gentler with his inquiry.

When I was younger, I used to ask very big questions about the world. What is this self? What is it supposed to do? What is the meaning of it all? “I WANT TO KNOW!” screamed my younger self. I wanted to find something that unifies every field of knowledge that I care about. I wanted my life to make sense. I’ll do everything I can to find out. Read, listen, talk to the best people who asked these questions, keep showing up. I WANT TO FIND OUT. I WANT, I WANT…

In hindsight, it sounds eerily like the youthful desire for non-stop penetration. Every profound question, like a deep thrust into the world, is intensely pleasurable but probably not last long. Thanks goodness the world didn’t let me get away with my uncurbed curiosi-libido. She suffused me with her mysterious presence and then twisted me unexpectedly with her beautiful curves. In surrendering to her beauty, I become more patient and attentive to the larger field surrounding us. In hot moments, it helps to slow down.

It took me a while to realize that when it comes to this beautiful act of making love with life, there is no right way. I used to believe that I would eventually find out The One Answer to my big bang questions. I craved for that enlightened climax and the mind-blowing bliss that followed, when I would finally arrive at True Happiness.

Self-help books out there sold me techniques that would make me proud of my prowess in life-lovemaking, things like meditation apps, gratitude journals and finding-your-mission courses. Those techniques are helpful, but they cannot make up for the attitude: to become less attached to my expectation.

I do expect more from life, but I also take my expectation less seriously. Beyond techniques, the art of life-lovemaking is to embody the mystery that neither what I desire of the world nor what the world desires of me will happen. Love happens at the frontier where these two circles don’t meet, which is why it’s extra-course rather than inter-.

There are more than just peaks. There are also plataeus.

(Having said that, you can get some pleasure from doing kinky BDSM role-playing with life. You can act as the dominant, trying to take over the world with whatever ideological whips, or you can act as the submissive, surrendering control with your self-blaming ties. I know, I derive lots of sado-masochistic pleasures from writing this too 😈)

The more I respect such mystery, the better love gets. Holding together mind and body, physically or imaginatively, I become something “for the world to run up against and rub up against: through the trials of love, through pain, through happiness, through our simple everyday movement”, as David Whyte wrote. In doing so, the world is also turned on, undressing a new layer in every moment. Given the ongoing ecological and political hot mess, she is rather a teenager going through puberty, unpredictable, full of untameable curiosity and always ready to explode into rebellious reimagination.

And I, I am a part of it, like a wave trying to understand the ocean while questioning its identity. I am loving and loved from her inside, patiently and passionately. This love making will not stop.

To complement the term at the beginning of this essay, I’m not only a life-fucker. I’m also life-fucked.

This section of the Enzyme is reserved for deeper musing, a part that most of general public wouldn't even care to read.

The difficult work of love-making with the world.

It's one thing to make love and another thing to sustain love-making. This is important to remember, especially for those youthful, mission-driven "let's make the world a better place" kind. Many good-hearted people I’ve met, despite working on very impactful work that helps the lives of hundreds and thousands people, seem to lack a kind of liveliness, a generative core that animates them.
You don't have to smile and feel meaningful all the time - I'm skeptical of that rah-rah optimism too – but if “work is love made visible”, you will hope for that love story to be a beautiful one that, despite real struggles, doesn’t end in a terrible breakup.
Your work must come from a hidden wellspring that nourishes you. Fear doesn’t, neither does guilt. Both “I’m afraid that if I don’t do something the world is doomed” and “I’ll feel so bad if I do nothing, given how privileged I am” aren’t sustainable source of motivation.
This is why the idea of “protecting the environment” hasn’t worked with me; I don't know about you, but I don't want to protect something simply out of the fear of losing it. I want to care for something because it's so beautiful. Because I’m in love with it. If the world is my lover, I must desire to make love with her not out of obligation but a genuine affection, not fear of losing her one day but an appreciation of being with her right now, knowing that she may soon not be the same. The Tibetan Buddhist's meditation on death was a powerful practice for a reason: in doing so, you let the mystery of life penetrate you, make you porous, fill you with its vital juices. Impermanence is the source of her beauty.

Sharing is sprouting.