Navigating desire delicately seems crucial.

I have failed at it plenty. Failed to navigate desire delicately.

There is a very delicate flavor to the moment when the desire to connect emerges. If I fake it before it has emerged, I can’t be delicate. If I pretend it hasn’t emerged when it has, I can’t be delicate.

It is truly vulnerable to be in that moment and I have noticed plenty of conditioning to respond to that vulnerability with attempts to control the other person or the environment.

My desire for a woman typically seems to come alive in a space of playful joy. There is something really special about a woman being joyful and radiant. Blooming really. Blooming like a flower that seems to evoke a honey bee inside me that wants to drink the nectar from the blooming flower.

Do I get a similar response when men come alive in playful joy? Of late, I do feel utterly delighted when a man is joyful. It’s taken years of work to root in a sense of brotherhood. Brotherhood towards all men. Even the most horrific of man is my brother. And I pray for him to find delicate delight. When he does, I feel very happy inside.

I have found this simple inner delight easiest to experience in the presence of children. When children are joyful—they often are, but not always—I feel very happy.

Life is expressing itself to its highest potential in this space of playful joy.

And yet there is something distinct about a woman, especially when a thread of attraction is alive, that joyful, playful delight seems to evoke Eros. Eros brings with it the desire to merge. Two become one. Man and woman becoming one flesh.

This aspect of merger initiates a movement towards. Like a honey bee might gently land on the petals of a blooming flower to sip its nectar.

However, the honey bee is no threat to the flower. There is no history of honey bees ripping flowers out but instead a continued journey of tenderly reaching for the nectar that the flowers joyfully offer.

That history is what we are up against, my brothers. That is the history that we are up against, both from our own lives and also ancestrally.

The history of men ripping out playful joy that they so desire for themselves, ending up with the material body but losing the essence.

The essence of life departs the material body when forces move harshly, to take what is not being offered joyfully.

The essence of life departs my material body, when I offer something without joy, secretly hoping to get something in return. Manipulation as a form of control.

When you forcibly take a material body whose essence has left, you have to find another material body with the essence. The material is never what we seem to want, else we’d be satisfied with the taking of it, no? It is the essence we are seeking.

A man may think he wants the woman’s body, but that’s not it.
A woman may think she wants the man’s possessions, but that’s not it either.

I experienced my inability to stay tender in the surfacing of desire most vividly in a short-lived romantic encounter with an exquisitely delicate woman who was at a delicate stage of her healing journey.

And upon contemplating the end of our romance, I realized that this seems to be the crux of all prior failed romantic encounters.

What makes it difficult to stay centered in tenderness is the urge to act quickly. To that voice within, we turn and say—No, we don’t need to act quickly. There is plenty of time to act. One never needs to act quickly. The quickest of actions unfold slowly.

Steady certainty, instead, is the flavor I opt for now. Quick actions wiggle around the line of steady certainty. If the woman you are with is gracious enough to hold space for your deviations—like many women are today, because they really do want to be in relationship with men—you might get multiple attempts to find that steady tender center. But it seems to come at a cost.

The cost of the fullest potential of radiant, expansive joy that romantic relationships can open up for two.

I quite regret the quick, sudden movements I have made from this place of urgency, thinking I was doing so to get something in the external world, but really I was doing that to run away from something in my internal world.

Now that is a lost cause. It is a lost cause to try to run away from what is inside. It just stays inside patiently waiting for you to come back from your run.

All the scary things within are things of the past, they are not happening right now, or things of the future, they haven’t happened yet, so in this moment there is actually great steady peace.

The more space I make for grieving what I thought I had and grieving what I thought I could have had, the more spaciousness I have for steady presence. In that steady presence, flowers all around bloom, yearning for a tender honeybee to land on them and sip the nectar they offer, as they do quite enjoy receiving a honeybee.