Manifesto

Everything I know I learned through my body.

I learned how to hold my head up.

I learned how to crawl.

I learned how to get food into my mouth.

I learned to stand, to walk, to skip, to run.

I learned how to run from trouble.

I learned how to laugh, how to cry, how to scold, how to sigh.

I learned how to sing badly and passionately at first.

I learned how to sing with confidence, with power, with continuous air flow through long vowels chopped by crisp consonants.

I learned how to cry with remorse, to weep in heavy grief, to wail in inconsolable loss.

I learned how to love, how to make love with my eyes.

I learned how to raise my voice in protest, to scream in anger, to suffer from both.

I learned resistance, and acquiescence.

I learned to wrestle, to tustle, to toss myself into the lake.

I learned to walk away from trouble.

I learned to live on my own.

I learned how to share meals, and jokes, and the driving on long trips.

I learned to flirt, to attract attention, to hide my attraction.

I learned to make love to a woman.

I learned to make love to a man, to many men--the boy wonder, the love of my life, my partner of thirteen years, my part-time boyfriend, my thousand and one one-night-stands, my tantra buddy, the married couple who lived across the hall, the two Terry's who tarried on New Years Eve to slide in and out of our bed all night and the rest of that year.

I learned to hug, and to kiss, and oh, to kiss long and deep.

I learned how to enjoy a bath, long and slow all alone and quiet, or with my lover leaning back into me, sharing our tired end of day troubles.

I learned how to enjoy a shower, alone with my voice, or soaping up my lover's crotch, a prelude to sex, or teaching my client how to find pleasure in washing me and in me washing him.

I learned to hold tight and to let go.

I learned to let myself be helped, to be comforted.

I learned to trust a friend, to become a trustworthy friend.

I learned to take control of my life, to make choices, to follow through.

I learned to let myself be carried along in the river of my soul's powerful destiny, to surrender to the flow, to dance in the stream, to set my course then let the currents take me.

Everything I know, everything worth knowing, I learned through my body.

I learned to love the silence at the bottom of the pool, to hate the silence of my empty room.

I learned to sing and to dance and to make my living with my loving hands.