Unearthing the Sensual - Anonymous

Unearthing the Sensual

anonymous

I am reluctant in my writing for this journal because I feel that so much of what I know and feel, words cannot encompass. Language is so limiting, so oversimplifying. Yet, although I do not hold onto the medium of language as a way to fully express my reality, I know there is some value in using this medium as an attempt to get a female voice across in a maledominated journal. Movements and critiques that root themselves in ideas presented largely by men I generally look upon with suspicion. Ideas that are framed in an intellectual, philosophical, language-based manner (which I realize to some extent is inescapable given the culture I’ve grown up in) often continue to give dominance to the ways of knowing that have been created by civilization. The critique of civilization feels like something I have known deep within me since I have memory of living, yet the names of men who’ve written books and given talks or the phrases and words used repeatedly in anarcho-primitivist circles were unfamiliar to me until recently. And although I feel myself in agreement with words and ideas, I don’t find them a necessary or deep enough way to engage with the fullness of my inner, primal being. As a woman I find myself much more deeply drawn to “practice” and embodiment. True, words and ideas and philosophizing are helpful because we have drifted so far from other ways of sensing/understanding and washed up on the shore of books, of study and academia. Yet how can these symbols on paper and be nearly enough to understand the depth of what is essential and primal? I feel that many women, with our cyclical rising and falling of hormone tides and bleeding bodies are still tapped into this embodied experience of life that our culture continues to fragment. I recall sitting at a conference, distracted by the blood pouring from me, frustrated with keeping my body still in a chair, inside a building, staring at a screen filled with type, when deep within I felt compelled to move my limbs, stand and let my body empty itself, go through the necessary process of life. And again now I think about the pain in my head from squinting my eyes into this bright computer screen and I try to remind myself why am I staring at these words instead of the cup of water in front of me or the snow outside which I can reach out and touch, smell, and taste. I do read. I discuss. And often find it to be helpful, interesting, sometimes enlightening. I find myself drawn more to books of practice, though, than theory or philosophy or ideology; how to alleviate pain through food and herbs, how to understand the rhythms and patterns of my moonly cycle, how to figure out which plants are edible and how they can be used for specific purposes. These are the ways of the body, the earth. They are not abstract or intangible like spirits or philosophies yet, unlike words, there is something elusive, indefinable about them. These ways are of the senses and I embrace them. And all that is still sensual in me.

“This is why women are knowing creatures; they are made, in essence, of the skin of the sole, which feels everything. This idea that the skin of the foot is sentient had the ring of a truth, for an acculturated Kiche tribeswoman once told me that she’d worn her first pair of shoes when she was twenty years old and was still not used to walking ‘con los ojos vendados,’ with blindfolds on her feet.” -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

:I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures have – a broad waft of clean air, a