A Sermon set Sideways…

Flower of an Unknown Land

--originally published 4/4/2015--

 

I’ve heard it said that if you’re really interested, willing to wait and watch and keep your mind open that reality will eventually present an answer to most riddles.  The thought of the day has endured for almost a decade now, a delightful tidbit of curiosity that simply refused to fade with the years.  It would seem the old riddle has been renewed with a purpose beyond simple curiosity, and it would equally seem reality has indeed brought me a piece of the answer to that riddle in the last couple of weeks.  Let me build a bit of a framework so this will make some sense.

Most everyone who knows me knows I carry a love for Ms. Alex, the beautiful woman who hosted the muse for me.  She was, and even yet still is, a powerful influence on my life. For all the years since her gift it has been a curiosity to me: how is it that she came to be as she was when I met her? 

With the subject of the year set as happiness I find myself ever more often returning to the example Ms. Alex set for me.  I saw her work magic in the lives of strangers (I’ll go ahead and call it magic, for a convenient handle) that has come to be a reference standard on the subject.  I’ve understood a bit of how her magic took effect on those she took into her focus, but there are other facets of the phenomenon still in search of an explanation.  An understanding of such a thing would be a most useful understanding reaching far beyond the context of simply man and muse.  You see, hers’ was a magic powered by a happiness most unique to her, I’d never seen anything similar before, and it appeared to be in a full and mature form...  the question, the riddle, being of course what components of reality went into creating a contagious form of happiness? 

The event that brought this riddle back front and center is a young woman, call her Kay, who is on the periphery of my sphere of empathy, one of the kids crewing the diner.  Let me describe Kay to you: twenty is a few months into her future, but most put her (to a casual acquaintance) as several years older,  an intelligence she tries to hide, just a shade tall to be called petite, athletic beneath just enough padding to run the light side of voluptuous, quick wit, quick bright smile… in short, a genuine 21st century fox.

In the last couple of months I’ve had the privilege of watching her truly blossom, one of those exponential jumps that happen when all the parts and pieces are in place and the last inhibiting factor fades from power.  A delightful thing to watch, a beautiful woman child transitioning into her full womanhood, but in her case there’s been a bit more, for as the transition has moved forward I’ve seen flickerings of that same magic I watched Alex wield with such skill.  Much younger, still a bit tentative, but unmistakably the same force in play.  Unlike Ms. Alex who I met fully mature in her abilities with Kay I got to observe the changes in her environment accompanying, perhaps facilitating, the growth and the understanding of how those changes impacted my young friend has been a bit of a Rosetta stone for both now and then.

You see, from all that I’ve seen the initiating event of her growth spurt was actually another woman, not quite so young, and decidedly of the girl-girl persuasion who fell harder for Ms. Kay than any three boys or five of us old men.  End and upshot of her unbridled ambition was a romance, a bit of an affair between the girls.  I have no idea if the affair continues as a love of the heart or a seduction evolved into simply a source of enjoyable sex play devoid of any serious emotional entanglements, not really any of my business.  But the net effect of the affair is of interest being as how it apparently became a tangent point in a life and the new trajectory of that life impacts many lives in the local proximity (several of her regulars are decidedly worried about the whole business, totally distrusting a lesbian’s ultimate motives and being rather fond of Ms. Kay and all… she’s become a bright spot in more than just my mornings).

So where do all the lines cross?  What common factor could exist between two women of different cultures separated by almost a generation and living half a world apart?  I’m gonna take my chain saw and go sit out on this limb here (and remind myself not to cut on the tree side of where I’m sitting!) and say the common factor between Ms. Alex and Ms. Kay actually resides in the maternal facets of the feminine heart, that portion in charge of picking herself a mate.

At this point you’re likely thinking “Say what?!?!?  A paragraph ago you were talking about a lesbian seduction.  Just how in the name of Noah’s pet whales does a lesbian seduction get tangled up with maternity?  Dude, what are you smoking and why aren’t you sharing any?”   If that’s what you’re thinking I don’t blame you, the question kicked my butt for a month before it finally dislodged some understanding.

When I kept company with Ms. Alex she wasn’t working alone, she had a partner in seduction I knew as Selene.  Back in the day it was thought by those who knew the girls that Selene was a bit more than just Alex’s lover (an assumption the girls deliberately fostered, for obvious reasons given the environment), more than just her producer in other artistic endeavors, it was said that when Alex was young to the erotic arts Selene had taken the role of mentor for her.  Now Selene is not only a beautiful woman she is also a wise woman of depth and substance, and in the days when she and Alex presented themselves to the world as a lesbian couple she had a saying that went “men for love and women for sex.”   

In truth I didn’t really care for that statement.  It seemed callous, to my ears it simply screamed of the manipulation and usury predatory women have been prone to working on immature males (of any age) since before the days of Moses, it fed suspicion and set off all the alarms.  For me it was a stumbling block to accepting Selene at face value, not a happy thing.  Perhaps that’s exactly what she wanted, a litmus test quick and dirty that would reveal a new patron’s emotional stance relative to the man-woman interface.  Likely enough, but I doubt I’ll ever really know the facts of the matter.

Anyway, it’s taken nearly a decade but I’ve now seen evidence in my personal reality that offers the potential to validate that statement under certain circumstances, and the nature of that validation is actually the main theme of this post, slow as it may have been in the developing.  The main point of this post is actually a justification, an exploration of the true value of the attitude known as chastity, odd as that might sound. 

Indulge an old man here, let me ramble a bit concerning these beautiful creatures, for what I say next applies equally across the board. 

Boy, I say boy, if any woman of her class and caliber should decide to take you to her bed you’d damn well better be ready for her: in shape, well rested and well fed, and don’t be a damn fool and get an egotistical big head about the whole affair or it will be six months before you figure out just how many times you did bounce on your way to the beach.  She’s a creature of pure passion, it’s her lineage, her heritage, her genetics, better than half of her life has been shaped and structured by both instinct and society to channel and direct that passion, to contain and control it.  She endures carrying the raw fire of life and if she releases the locks and allows that passion full freedom not only will she be the lay of your lifetime the consequences will run far beyond the sweat you left on a lover’s bed, it will in all truth become the measure of a man. 

Take my word for it lad, that’s how it will be if you’re one of the ones she chooses for  intimate testing to see if you’re who she wants as the father of her children.  Basic facts of life, but there’s much more in play than just that.  In all truth the human race endures on that fire she carries, and this she’ll know as well, it’s coded into her instincts, sooner or later that truth will present itself to her. 

It’s that “sooner or later” thing that throws the wrinkles.  Sooner or later relative to what?  Relative to her  of course, where she is on the curve that represents her life, her maturity. Societies world wide usually set some arbitrary calendar age and say “ok, at this point you’re now an adult, you’re a grown up so behave accordingly.”  I am enough of a redneck to be legal exercising a basic redneck prerogative here, and I’m going to, to wit, look the world’s societies in the eye and call “bullshit.”  It doesn’t work that way, not for either gender.

Think about it.  People don’t grow at the same rate, even beyond the environments of their life there’s always genetics to consider.  There is no way to assign some arbitrary calendar age as the onset of any given facet of maturity, it just can’t be done.  Best you can get is a mean, an average, from that whole statistical distribution thing.  That may be sufficient for broad stroke work on society as a whole, but considered at the individual level where we each and every one of us live it is worse than useless, it contaminates our reality with expectations we may be ready to live up to, or not, it may compel us to wait years before society allows us what we were in fact ready for five years earlier (with all the risks associated to idle hands being the devil’s workshop and other such folkisms carrying a kernel of truth). 

There simply is no way, shy of actually knowing someone worl and well, to know when that person is ready for any given facet of life.  It is in accommodation of this fact that the concept of chastity is desperately needed as an active force within society, needed to protect the final stages of people’s maturation from premature expectations that can, and usually do, damage and deform the final form of a life and personality and the entire culture as a cumulative consequence.

That understanding was Ms. Kay’s gift to me, realizing that she’d blossomed in her dealings with the world at large because her affair with the lesbian lass was sheltering her from society’s expectations that were in fact premature for her, sheltering her to the point of allowing her to re-establish a chaste  attitude with the remainder of her world.  The difference that chastity made, regardless of the sexuality that enabled it, was literally night and day.

Like I said, she’s a fox, no doubt hot and hot blooded, sizzling sensuous, intelligent and perceptive, of course she’s going to sense every male who looks at her thinking “damn, I’d like some of that…”  while giving not a thought as to her true state of life, giving not a thought as to what his ambition, transitory as it might be, is causing her to endure as her instincts respond to his.  She’s going to feel that lack of chastity, whether she knows to call it that or not, and what a totally unfair thing that is to do to her when she knows inside herself that she’s not ready to allow such an ambition, not from anyone, to go to maturity in the form of the new family that both society and nature’s instinct desire.  What a motive to grow some callous, sacrifice that innocent sensuality into a protective shell of cynicism and distrust of the sort that usually ends up in a divorce court fresh come from a therapists couch. 

The problem here, as in so many places, is that a basic concept of life is poorly understood, often misapplied, in point of fact quite bastardized compared to the functional facts of the matter.  Chastity is no more celibacy than innocence is ignorance, but those who claim to champion what the Hindu people call dharma  have allowed this understanding to fade from common knowledge (in my part of the world “they” would primarily be those religions descended from the tent of Abraham, and the cynic in me would say “they” have encouraged such understanding to fade from common knowledge so the confusion and resulting contradictions created can be harvested as political power controlled by their collectives, but that’s just me).

In any case what a fine weapon the enemy acquired with the demise of chastity, such a fine tool for maintaining the currently downright miserable status quo.  I’m of a mind to believe that in the cause of happiness it is time and high time to establish a dialog on the subject of chastity, what it is and what it really isn’t, and start the work of migrating that understanding back into the common knowledge even if in the beginning it must be smuggled in by the alternate lifestyles right under the oversize noses of those whose secret ambition is to make sure our culture is as un-chaste as they can arrange for with their lies and their misdirection on the subject.

As for Ms. Kay?  I’m going to smile when I see her, watch with delight as she expands her command of that magic of contagious happiness, and to her I offer a most sincere Thank You, you join the ranks of the other good women who’ve enlarged my life by teaching me something… sweetheart may the rain kiss on your garden while the sun shines on your street, laughter find you often, tears be brief and sweet.  Via con dios beautiful woman.