Words by Madison Grace (She/They)

This morning everything stilled.

The light went gauzy, and the sound of the world beyond my window lifted. Even she was gone, and I was a body alone, drifting in open water. Warm and weightless. In deep silence. In the act of two bodies making love: a moment of solitude.

So often, I’ve not allowed myself the freedom to swim in this moment. I’ve felt the need to perform through it, to stay vocal and active with my partner: communicating pleasure, letting them know where I’m at. At times, this is important — consent and communication are, of course, necessary in intimate exchanges. But how do we begin to form a language within intimacy that allows for moments of passivity? A way of being in communion with another body in a way that goes beyond verbal language, and allows us to experience the fullness of sex — the whole landscape.

We are, by nature, ephemeral beings. Our inner worlds ebb and flow: we cannot stay within one state of being forever. We shift and are bound by transience. It gives us meaning. We delight in the sea, because we live on the land. This is to say: we find pleasure in sensation. If it lasted forever we wouldn’t know its worth, or think it special.

The outer world tells us otherwise. It exalts stability. Tells us to work for it, find it, and never let go. Tells us to welcome change only when it is invited to the table. Tells us our worth lies in our capacity to be productive. We forget how to be slow. We forget that joy, or passion, or pleasure doesn’t always look big. And so, we teach ourselves to perform it, and in this process we lose moments of profundity and deep knowing. Of expansive sensation, and stillness.

The writer Annie Dillard once said that ‘how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives’.

So, how we spend our moments is how we spend our days.

We are, by nature, ephemeral beings. How can we change our perception, to settle into life’s natural rhythms: its ebb and flow? How can we better listen to ourselves and each other, and learn how to tend to pleasure, in all its forms?