Podcast 082 - Thumbprints In Our Spirit

Jan 21

Written By

As our communities mourn the passing of various icons of culture, Lee takes a moment to reflect on the concept that certain people, memories and moments leave thumbprints upon the clay of our sense of self. Looking back on his life he notes some of those moments (from TLC to moments of trauma), but asks us each to reflect on our own experiences that shaped us. From those seeds, however, we get to choose where they grow, and consider that each of us get to craft our clay, no matter how many thumbprints are in it.

Announcer:
BDSM and non-standard relationships, power exchange and polyamory, sacred sexuality and fetishes, as well as Simply Fun Kink.

You're listening to The Erotic Awakening Podcast Network.

Welcome to The Passion And Soul Podcast, an exploration of personal and interpersonal desire, faith and connection.

Your host, international sexuality and spirituality author and educator, Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com, will take you on a sultry and intellectual journey through the soul of intimate experience.

Take a moment and breathe deep, and get ready for an adventure.

This podcast is a chance to glimpse into the ever increasing diverse world of alternative life.

The Passion And Soul Podcast is intended for mature audiences.

If you are offended by adult topics or prohibited by law, we recommend you stop listening right now.

Lee:
Hello, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to the Passion And Soul Podcast with Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com.

Following social media recently, it's been fascinating to watch people's grieving over celebrity, to watch people miss Alan Rickman, to miss Lemmy the frontman for Motorhead, to miss David Bowie, to miss...

People don't necessarily miss these people.

They miss their memories.

I've been watching people talk about how David Bowie wasn't necessarily a good person and how we need to look at the power exchange present in sex and sexuality between youth and adults.

Talking about statutory rape, talking about how people might be both good people at times and abusers, how it is a complex issue.

While others are saying, just give us time to grieve, give us time to be with our sorrow.

But they're not looking to sorrow and mourn over the people they knew.

They are not his wife.

They are not the people dearest to him.

People are mourning their memories.

They are remembering that moment when they pulled out a record and said, I am not alone here in the shadow.

I am not the only one who is lost.

I am seen.

I am so beautiful.

Or I am just as troubled as this person is.

Or wow, I am not the only one who can laugh at these stories.

I remember the first time I saw Closetland, and I was beautifully disturbed and turned on.

I was with my first spouse, I believe.

And for people who haven't seen it and are into, I think, especially interrogation of any sort, it is deeply fascinating and, I would argue, erotic.

For others, though, is remembering Alan Rickman when he is in dogma.

He is in Meditron and the voice of God.

And that moment you see, that moment you see Alanis Morissette come on as female deity.

It's beautiful.

It's delicious.

It's funny.

These are our memories, and we mourn the fact that they will never come again.

Thinking about, er, I've been working on a book recently on transgender issues and understanding transgender realities.

And just because I am glad I transitioned does not mean I do not mourn the loss of those moments.

It's okay to miss those things I had when I was a woman.

It is okay to miss our past relationships.

It is okay to mourn and remember.

It's okay.

We are not necessarily saying we want them back, because even if we had them back, they would never be quite the same.

David Bowie will never produce another album just like what he's produced before.

Alan Rickman will never produce a movie just like what he's produced before, but we mourn the fact that there's not a potential again.

And we mourn that idea of a changing in the chapters of our life.

We remember and turn in our sorrow to flip through the books in that half log of our life.

We start writing another chapter in our own anthology, and yet we remember, and parts of us wish there were more.

And that's okay.

We're allowed to.

For me, David Bowie was not the thing that etched in my mind.

It was not what left thumb prints in the clay of my reality that when I pass away, will be put into the kiln and will turn into the pottery that people remember me by.

It's not what left the thumb in the wetness of my spirit.

There are other things, though.

I remember being in my teens and having early teens and having TLCs.

Let's Talk About Sex, come on.

Let's Talk About Sex, baby.

Let's Talk About You And Me.

Let's Talk About All The Good Things And The Bad Things That May Be.

Let's Talk About Sex.

And seeing Lisa Left Eye Lopez with a condom over her eye.

Seeing a bandolier of condoms thrown over a body.

Women saying, no, really, it's not just a man's responsibility to bring a condom.

It's not just about one person's journey.

It's about your journey.

It's about your authentic sexuality.

And it got me thinking about my authentic sexuality.

It got me engaged in my own breath and my own spirit.

I've been masturbating since I was very young, I'd say, six, seven, but I can actively remember having one pornography and being fascinated by the bodily journeys of other people.

Word penetration.

And even before that, remember wrapping myself, I should say, in layers of blankets and curling up in the cocoon of safety.

These are memories.

Now, it's not that I had all of these things be orgasmic and be body revelatory.

Those didn't come until later, until I also was in my teens.

My first orgasm wasn't in the most positive experience, shall we say.

It was in a darkness of time.

A loss of my own bodily autonomy.

I am a survivor of such things, and I am a memory keeper of such things.

But they are also things that left a thumbprint upon the wetness of my clay.

It's not necessarily something that I am a victim from.

I have chosen not to frame my life in such a way.

I understand the sorrows and the pain and suffering of others who have experienced such things in such ways.

I understand deeply and personally.

But for me, it is not just something that has left an indelible mark upon me.

It is something that began to shape me in a new and beautiful direction because I came to empathize and understand others in their journey.

And how can that not be something I am also grateful for?

Not only was that encounter something that left in me something different, not only was it TLC, but there are so many other things as well.

I recently posted as a joke on my Facebook page that growing up in the 80s, how could we not become deviants and erotic adventurers when the heroes that were on television as cartoons were My Little Pony and Rainbow Bright, or He-Man in Nothing But A Loin Club?

If these were the things we turned to, how can we not have been these pictures that we are?

If it is Wolverine strapped into tightness, how can we not be what we are?

When I was doing professional domination work, I had a client who was fascinated by the idea of cannibalism.

And it didn't come from, you know, pornography around these things, and it didn't come from a partner somehow turning them on.

It was about the fact that they happened to get their first erection when they were watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon that had that cheesy cannibal throwing Bugs Bunny into a pot.

That idea manifested in a vine that became a seed, that grew, that grew and blossomed as we never had expected.

It transformed over the years, but that seed was what started it all.

The most contagious thing on the planet is an idea, something that I will always be grateful for in the book Snow Crash.

The most contagious thing on the planet is an idea, and that idea laid an egg, that idea implanted in his cells.

Now, working with him was really interesting, because I got to do all kinds of different things.

I got to butter him and cover him in parmesan and lick it off.

I got to oil his body.

I got to bind him in different shapes to make him into a roast.

I got to once, when I was having way too much fun and a lot of budget, I got to rent a beautiful suite.

And I took the spa bathtub in it and I ended up filling it with chicken bouillon.

I believe it was chicken.

Putting him in it, very, very hot, but not scalding.

And I sat there in a big-page Jungle Girl outfit with a chef's hat on, one high-heeled leg up.

And I took potatoes and carrots and cut them up on top of him.

And turned him into a stew.

We are able to be creative with our sexuality.

And that is an amazing thing.

If you can see inside yourself and look at what are the seeds, what are that, what are those thumb prints, we can find places to take it.

If I know that I have started to create an oblong shape upon the pottery wheel, shall we say, I can turn it into a vase.

And I can also take that curve and push out the sides and turn it into a curving bowl.

One of the fetishes I know I have is eating food off the ground.

It does not come from a happy place.

It comes from when I was hungry and looking for food in trash cans and willing to eat food that had only been on the ground for a moment.

It's not a big deal necessarily, and yet it is a big deal.

I went to a keynote speech once at the ASECT conference, the American Association for Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, that really stuck with me on a couple of levels.

It was by an author who wrote, Somebody's Been Sleeping In My Head, and he's a Freudian psychoanalyst specializing in erotic dreams.

And he'd been working with clients for decades.

And for him, it was interesting to tease out erotic fantasy and reoccurring sexual fantasies, and then over time, finding the roots, finding the seeds that led to it.

It was the story of a woman who had a reoccurring fantasy of sex with a certain person, a certain actor, in a red car.

And over time, found out that the person's brother would have been that age of that actor, and he died in a car crash.

Seeds that get planted in our unconscious mind.

And he argued that only by taking out, by pointing out those things, and slowly cutting out the cancer of these seeds, are we able to find health in our body.

And we will know by when we are no longer holding on to those sexual fantasies that we are healthy.

And I left that keynote speech mad.

Mad.

Really, really mad.

And I couldn't place it originally.

And then I figured it out.

The idea that we must cut out these fantasies to be healthy.

The idea that in seeding those seeds, we must weed them out.

I strongly disagree.

I say there is something really beautiful if those seeds have not turned into bones that are strangling out our life, that have stopped the rest of us from growing.

They have not harmed us.

Why must we cut out the beauty from our lives?

Why must we tear apart ourselves?

Why must we do this when there is so much more available?

If I am turned on by the idea of eating food, eating a piece of candy off my lover's boot, if I can find a titillation in this, if I can find an arousal in this, and it doesn't harm me, it isn't causing bodily harm to me or someone else, it isn't something that is a debilitating paraphilia, a debilitating fetish that is, should say, a fetish, that I end up spending my money on shoes instead of paying for my rent.

If I really like these things, what is the harm?

Why not enjoy them?

Why not look at that seed and say, oh, wow, okay, that's okay, I'll enjoy it.

And for other people, and either fetishes I have, why not be okay, I have this fetish, do I need to dive into it if it harm none?

Now, one might argue that I happen to like rough sex, and I happened to have my first orgasm in a time period where I did not choose to be there, where it was a form of sexual assault.

Do I need to bemoan that?

Or one might say, well, you need to look at your desires for hardcore SM because maybe there is some seed there that is dark and broken and unhealthy.

You could say that.

Or I could enjoy it.

And for other people, I know they hear these stories that there must be a seed of darkness planted in their mind, in their heart, in their cunt, in their cock, that there must be a seed and they root and dig and dig and find nothing.

Is there something wrong with them then?

I know a person in the Midwest who, when we were on a panel about something, I don't even remember nowadays, she joked that she bred thoroughbreds.

And what she was joking about was that her child was also pinky.

She and that child never did anything together.

They never had a dark experience.

They just were.

My parents also were on some level.

My mother joked that, you know, I'd jerk her up once she said she was a little kinky too.

And when I hooked her up, she said, I need to explain something.

I'm not kinky like piercings and whips and stuff like that.

My mom had a slice of spice.

My father once told me all about the sexual adventures he had in Thailand, perhaps more than I wanted to know.

My mother's mother, she certainly got around and had a good time.

My father's father's mother was a model for Charles Guyette.

She was so proud of telling me that when I was eight years old.

I had no idea that Charles Guyette was a photographer until I was much older.

Sometimes these things become embedded in our blood.

One might argue that it's a form of trauma, but I would argue that it is a form of bliss and that our different wirings can be embedded in us generationally.

It doesn't have to be trauma and pain that plants these seeds.

Why can it not be joy?

Perhaps we love denim because we had a consensual lover who ran their hands up our thighs, and we felt the texture along our bodies.

We felt that texture and that embedded in us that, oh, yes, yes, this.

To the point that the next time we play with someone, why don't I wear those jeans again?

For folks who don't know, you can see some of my upcoming appearances at passionandsoul.com forward slash appearances.

And there's also some really great events happening right now out in the world, such as the crew GRUE coming up through greydancer.com.

You can find all the information there.

And I'm also part of the podcast network, which is Erotic Awakenings.

All the different things that I've mentioned today in our podcast are available over on my podcast, part of my website.

And so feel free to go and look at all of the show notes there.

And until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically you, and embrace your time.
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