Eros is the energetic charge that is in service of integrating all matter.
Eros in the earliest texts is the Son of Chaos and represents the attractive force behind friendships, partnerships, marriages and the creation of projects, buildings, food, dance and works of art etc. Later, Eros is the Son of Aphrodite and embodies lust in the persona field expressed sexually intermingled with identity and needs for belonging in family, community and culture. Lust as part of Chaos can be understood as being in service to creation and lust in service to Aphrodite can be understood to be in service to safety and belonging needs.
Eros represents a wide range of human experience that is in service ultimately to integrating these two fundamental aspects of being human, the tension between expansion and creativity and needs for safety and belonging.
Integration is achieved, for us as humans, by differentiated expressions of ourselves being witnessed with attuned receptivity and acceptance supporting belonging. When we belong, we know that each of our differentiated voices are part of a chorus and we matter as part of the whole.
This differentiation, for humans, is expressed in a myriad of ways through symbols. These include all aspects of creation from complex series of decisions that express and embody aspects of our inner world’s biochemical responses to our internal drives for thriving in relation with each other. I include all creatures and plants in “each other”. We are continually responding to these expressions from our internal drives for thriving in service to our life, reproduction, longevity and belonging that are affected by the creatures, plants, weather, and environmental matter in our environments. Most of all, our belonging with other humans matters. The bigger picture for us as a race is that our belonging depends on us being indigenous with the creatures and plants around us and inside us. We are indigenously symbiotic with all living things and matter but due to our evolution, most of us are still learning how to naturalise. We need language and symbols to help us naturalise on our journey back into becoming indigenously integrated with all aspects of life and matter.
Body Poem holds these expressions and responses differentiating these parts of ourselves supporting our sovereignty. Our sovereignty can be understood to be our kind attuned listener who mentors all the parts of us making decisions to meet our needs as part of the greater good.
If we are spending five minutes with a person’s Body Poem, imagine we are sampling a teaspoon of their alchemy that is made up of memories and emotions seeking integration. If we spend half an hour with their alchemy, it might be that we are sampling several teaspoons and so on. The ingredients, like those in soup, are always the same but different flavours surface into our awareness into aliveness integrating with the present ingredients of our experience as new ingredients are being added.
Language supports us to understand ourselves and each other carrying embodied multi-sensory messages between your world and mine.
Language can open the chords of our hearts when its messages are spoken or sung as poetry as song and poetry emerges from the descriptive timeless multidimensional parts of the mind that are indigenous with our bodies.
The evaluative parts of our minds are sequencing our experiences in service of order and rationality and are creating a literal sense of our experiences to relate to with each other in the third dimension of experience.
These messages, whatever they carrying, are like Trojan horses. They can get under our skin influencing the biochemical emotions in our bodies and how we experience ourselves in relationships with each other. Messages can exile or include, invade or honour, accept or reject. They can rationalise, manipulate, seduce, conceptualise, excite, stimulate, expand, reduce, judge, describe, intensify, soothe and calm. Language is how we negotiate with each other and with the decisions and choices we make as part of our self-expression being human.
Poetry is where imagination and literal reality dance together. Where lines of words can sing, caress, resonate, hold, awaken, deepen, arouse and ache our hearts.
Words and lines of words attune with songlines in our bodies. These songlines can awaken memories felt viscerally in our bones, our guts, our hearts, our roots, our fingertips and toes and deep into our histories felt by our ancestors that are ever projecting into our beings from all dimensions of reality.
We all carry this alchemy projecting into our collective future together on this planet with our words churning our guts or soothing and caressing us into our collective waking and sleeping dreaming.
In nature, each individual is part of a collective sharing resources like the trees in a forest with their roots and the mycelium networks singing, silent to us humans, underground tunes nourishing each tree and sapling in the forest.
These underground networks have consciousness as they respond to the callings of each tree sending and delivering nutrients. The forests reach up from their roots to the sky, their trunks becoming arms and hands with delicate fingers and leaves. These are for the toes of birds to hold onto as they too sing their callings indigenously with their heart’s callings in chorus together rejoicing gratitude and needs in song. The fruits and the flowers and leaves the food for all creatures who pollinate and plant the seeds of the next generations of trees. There is no shame in this attunement with needs calling out and being responded to with cross-species generous spontaneity.
When a human choir sings together, each singer is simultaneously listening and singing so that their voice is attuned in harmony with the whole in service of the chorus voice rather than the individual. We know what this sounds like when someone is out of tune with the collective. A lesson in individualistic hedonism where pleasure might be out of tune with the collective pleasure and beauty of all the creatures and animals we are sharing this planet with. We are taught in choirs to listen to the other voices as we sing.
As we listen to each other, as humans, we learn not to dominate and we also learn that our voice matters as part of the harmony of the whole.
Robin Wall Kimmera, a botanist and writer said that she had noticed when she created her own names instead of using the Latin names for aspects of nature she continued to explore the nature of what she had noticed. “I keep looking even closer to see if I have gotten it right.”
I’m trying to imagine what it would be like going through life not knowing the names of plants and animals around you. I think it would be a little scary and disorientating – like being lost in a foreign city you can’t read the street signs. Philosophers call this state of isolation in disconnection “species loneliness”. – A deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of creation, from the loss of relationship. As a human dominance of the world has grown we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbours. It is no wonder that naming was the first job the creator gave to human.
The first human watched then carefully see how they live and spoke to them to learn what gifts they carried in order to discern the true name. Right away he began to feel more at home I was not lonely anymore but he could call out to the others by name and they called out to him and he passed.
– Robin Wall Kimmera
She goes on to say “names are the way we humans build relationships not only with each other but with the living world.“
The beauty of Body Poem lies in it being indigenous with the biological nature of being human. It is poetry emerging from the logic of biology.
References Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Love Cure by John Ryan Haule