Editor’s Note: Due to a work situation, Maria Padhila’s column will not be appearing today, but it should be back next weekend at its usual time. So we’re taking this opportunity to share one of our favorite articles on sex, sexuality and relating from the Planet Waves archives. It’s a multi-part series called, “It’s not about sex. It’s about Self,” first published in February 2008. You can continue reading with Part Two here.
RECENTLY, I visited the Grandmother Land with Hannah, one of the Book of Blue models I photograph. It was sunny and warm for a winter day, but still chilly. I wasn’t expecting her to work nude, but she has a Capricorn Sun and Moon — she’s winter’s child, confident and present in the world.
Determined to make good pictures, she peeled off her layers and stripped down to a thin pair of sweats. In the photographs, I blended details of her body into the magnificent winter landscape till the goose bumps took over. Noticing them vividly through my lens, I suggested she get dressed. In those 15 minutes, we got some earthy photos of an earthy girl.
Then we wandered around the woods for a bit. I spontaneously started collecting bits of kindling from tree branches, and suggested we make a fire. This we did, and sat in the cold January sunlight for hours next to the flames and slow-rising smoke, eating Five Fruits Lifesavers and talking about everything that came up. This of course included sex. After we had gone far enough into the discussion to appreciate the complexity of our subject, she said some words that fairly well stunned me and would have been cheered at any human potential workshop in the 1970s, long before she was born — “It’s not about sex. It’s about self.”
What she had observed, mainly through observing herself, is that when you follow sexual awareness into yourself, you’re taken to the core of self-awareness. The psyche on its deepest layers is so closely intertwined with sexual consciousness as to be one and the same with it. Because it accounts for how we come into the world, which is the only world we know, sex is cosmic. Yet discussion of sex is a kind of ruse for the real discussion, below the surface, and that is about one’s sense of identity and existence.
This makes sense. Assuming they are not cloning people yet, we all come into existence through sex or at least sex cells. Half of us start as a sperm cell that experiences an orgasm and then takes a big ride on an ejaculation, carried along in an ocean of whatever feelings are present. The sperm cell who became us personally went up to that enormous egg (our other half) and kissed it, surrendering its prior form and identity into a new entity. That is how our existence begins, and that memory is, I would imagine, directly in our DNA, along with the instructions for how to do it again.