Seven Sex Secrets for Spring

1) Spring is sex. It is the planet (or the part of the planet now tilting towards the sun) making love, conceiving the fruit it will later bear. You could think of a flower (or flowering) as orgasm, an ecstatic response to increasing light, warmth, an ecstatic opening to the breeze or the bees that will pollinate the plants. What a range of response from subtle and delicate (think of a snowdrop or a violet) to flagrant and bawdy. Is there anything sexier than a bright red tulip full blown?

2) Lover bees. Worker bees, as they are called, are neither male nor female, in that they don’t reproduce. While the drones hang out at the hive, waiting for the privilege of dying in the act of impregnating the queen, whose only job is to keep laying eggs, the so-called worker bees are penetrating those tulips and every other blooming thing they can find. The bees, like Spring, are sex. I call them lover bees, for they are the lovers of the world.

3) The sun loves you. We are just animate bits of earth, made of the same substance as everything else. After a long winter of short cold days, we respond to the waxing sun with the same eagerness and joy as the animals and the plants. On the first warm days, lie in the sun and let it touch you all over. The sun’s light is touch, penetrating touch, healing touch, sensual touch. Let yourself open to that touch.

4) So does the rain: When the sun thaws the earth, snowmelt and rain soften it, so that it can be planted. Seeds that have wintered over sprout and drink the moisture. New green blades pierce through the damp, soft dirt. Even if you don’t want to walk or lie out in the rain, when a spring shower comes, step outside and smell the sweetness and freshness of everything. Feel your own hard edges soften.

5) Become the earth’s lover: When you plant a seed, you procreate—or co-create—with the earth. You prepare the ground like any good lover, you penetrate it with your hands, placing the seed inside, smoothing the dirt back over it, watering the ground if it’s dry. Even if you do not have room for a garden, consider growing something in a planter on a windowsill. If you can, make love near your plants or your garden, just as people have from time immemorial.

6) Take god or goddess as your lover. Because we are surrounded by a mating world, Spring is sometimes painful for people who are single. Acknowledge loneliness, seek a new lover if you want one, but always remember that you are the beloved of life itself. Divine love is or can be as erotic as any other kind. Ask Teresa of Avila. If you do not conceive of the divine this way (or in any way) just remember Eros is life force. It is within you and around you at all times.

7) Love god or goddess in your beloved. Loving the divine in your lover may be easy when you are first in love. All you long-time lovers who see each other through an accretion of comfort and irritation, let Spring strip you to your naked, burning radiance. Look at the iridescence of the buds and the new leaves. Everything is on fire. You are the maypole and the caressing weave of ribbons, in and out, up and down. Get out there into the fields help those crops grow.

Happy Autumn to my friends in New Zealand! I promised at least one autumn sex secret. May Eve and All Hallow’s Eve, the great feasts of sex and death, face each other across the year. Sex and death are inextricably linked. One would not exist without the other. Orgasm is sometimes called the little death; we lose ourselves in ecstasy; our boundaries dissolve. I am on this side of the veil, so I can’t say for sure, but I hope death is orgasmic. Flowering is ecstatic but so is a leaf flying from a tree in a high wind, or dropping on a perfect still morning. Maybe turning back into loam is ecstatic, too, a relief, a release. Autumn gives us a chance to let go, to go under, to curl into the darkness of the great lover. Happy Autumn, New Zealand, combrogos!

I am not sure yet, but I think I will stick with the subject of sex for a while. Sex and religion, sex and the sacred. That sort of thing. If you think that’s a good idea for this blog spot, chime in.