Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Mothering ourselves means learning to love what we have given birth to by giving definition to, learning how to be both kind and demanding in the teeth of failure as well as in the face of success, and not misnaming either. When you come to respect the character of the time you will not have to cover emptyness with pretense . * We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created. As we fear each other less and value each other more, we will come to value recognition within each other’s eyes as well as within our own, and seek a balance between these visions. Mothering. Claiming some power over who we choose to be, and knowing that such power is relative within the realities of our lives. Yet knowing that only through the use of that power can we effectively change those realities. Mothering means the laying to rest of what is weak, timid, and damaged — without despisal — the protection and support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint explorations of the difference. I recall a beautiful and intricate sculpture from the court of the Queen Mother of Benin, entitled “The Power Of The Hand.” It depicts the Queen Mother, her court women, and her warriors in a circular celebration of the human power to achieve success in practical and material ventures, the ability to make something out of anything. In Dahomey, that power is female. VIII Theorizing about self-worth is ineffective. So is pretending. Women can die in agony who have lived with blank and beautiful faces. I can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who I am not, and learn to savor the sweetness of who I am. I can make friends with all the different pieces of me, liked and disliked. Admit that I am kinder to my neighbor’s silly husband most days than I am to myself. I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy little Black girl who once longed to be white or anything other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was the sum of the color of her skin and the textures of her hair, the shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not acceptable as human. Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a simplistic insistence that “Black is beautiful.” It goes beyond and deeper than a surface appreciation of Black beauty, although that is certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to reclaim ourselves and each other remains there, then we risk another superficial measurement of self, one superimposed upon the old one and almost as damaging, since it pauses at the superficial.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Unlike push motivations, which require you to face your distress and be made uncomfortable, pull motivations promise potential rewards and benefits. Believable, enticing images of how your life can be more fulfilling are immensely helpful in keeping motivation alive even in the face of adversity. Maggie was willing to consider stepping outside the familiar framework of unfulfilled longing not simply because she feared a life of loneliness but also because she had experienced moments of actual intimacy and was beginning to believe she deserved more of it. Similarly, Ryan was not only pushed by shame about being a prisoner of his taboo impulses, he was also pulled by a genuine desire to feel closer to his girlfriend. ANTIMOTIVATIONSWhen you set out to change an entrenched pattern, sooner or later you will feel inclined to back away from the very changes you seek. Psychologists call this resistance. All kinds of doubts and fears, both conscious and unconscious, can contribute to resistance. What if you fail? What are the implications of success? Could tampering with your eroticism ruin it? Will friends, family members, or sexual partners encourage you, or might they be threatened by what you’re doing? If your sexuality changes will you still recognize yourself? These concerns, along with a host of others, are antimotivators because they prevent you from vigorously pursuing your goals. Antimotivators are as much a part of the change process as your goals and motivations. Because antimotivators are most likely to undermine change when they operate subconsciously, it’s smart to become as aware of them as possible. If you face your fears about change rather than suppress them you will be much better able to address what concerns you. Antimotivators contain crucial information about which courageous acts are called for—and when. YOUR MAP FOR CHANGESuccessful and fulfilling erotic changes involve all three: push motivators, pull motivators, and antimotivators. To boost your awareness, put them all together on one piece of paper so you can see them at a single glance. Write the headline GOALS, and then list your objectives as clearly as you can. Maggie’s Motivational Map Goals: • To be attracted to someone available for a relationship • To only love someone who loves me in return • To develop other turn-ons besides longing • To let myself accept love [image file=image_rsrc3FH.jpg] Next divide the area below your goals into three columns. Label the left column Push Motivators. As specifically as possible, list the reasons that you believe change is necessary. Focus on what concerns you about your eroticism—anything that causes pain or distress. Label the middle column Pull Motivators. Here spell out how you hope to benefit, either immediately or in the long run. Label the right column Antimotivators and list any fears and hesitations that might hold you back.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Some of us made it and some of us were lost to the struggle. It was a time of great hope and great expectation; it was also a time of great waste. That is history. We do not need to repeat these mistakes in the 80s. The raw energy of Black determination released in the 60s powered changes in Black awareness and self-concepts and expectations. This energy is still being felt in movements for change among women, other peoples of Color, gays, the handicapped — among all the disenfranchised peoples of this society. That is a legacy of the 60s to ourselves and to others. But we must recognize that many of our high expectations of rapid revolutionary change did not in fact occur. And many of the gains that did are even now being dismantled. This is not a reason for despair, nor for rejection of the importance of those years. But we must face with clarity and insight the lessons to be learned from the oversimplification of any struggle for self-awareness and liberation, or we will not rally the force we need to face the multidimensional threats to our survival in the 80s. There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective. We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me — Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of changeability, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child. Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves — along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core — the fountain — of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt — of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead — while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. * First published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, no. 3 (1977). ** From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1982) p. 53. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action * I HAVE COME to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign. But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action. In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Isaac is not in his bed when I wake. He’s not in the house. I check every corner, dragging my half useless leg behind me. My guess is that I’ve been unconscious for at least twenty-four hours, perhaps more. I step outside in Isaac’s oversized clunky boots, sinking into the fresh snow. The blizzard has all but covered the lower half of the house. Snow piles in graceful sweeps of white. White, white, white. All I see is white. It looks like the house is wearing a wedding dress. If there were tire marks, they are gone now. I walk as far as I can before reaching the fence. I am tempted to touch it. To let the volts shake my body and send my heart to a screeching stop. I reach my gloves toward the chain link. My light wool gloves that do nothing to stave off the frigid air. I might as well be wearing lace on my hands, I think for the thousandth time. Isaac is out. My hands pause midair. I have no idea if Elgin will take him to a hospital. My hands move an inch toward the fence. But if she does, he will live. And I might see him again. I drop my hands to my sides. She’s crazy. For all I know she’s locked him up somewhere else where she can play more of her sick games. No. Dr. Elgin always did what she said she was going to do. Even if it meant locking me up like an animal to fix me. The last time I had seen Saphira Elgin was a year past the date I filed a restraining order against Isaac. I’d been seeing her once a week for over a year. Our visits, that had started with her extracting one sliver at a time from the lockdown that is my mind, eventually became more relaxed. More pleasant. I got to speak to someone who didn’t really care about me. She wasn’t trying to save me, or love me to better health; she was paid (a hundred dollars an hour) to take an unbiased look into my soul and help me find the crickets. That’s what she called them: crickets. The little chirping noises that were either alarms, or echoes, or the unspoken words that needed to be spoken. Or that’s what I thought anyway. Turns out Saphira cared above and beyond her pay grade. She entered God’s pay grade. Toying with fate and lives and sanity. But that last time, the last time I saw her, she’d said something that in hindsight should have been my clue in to her insanity.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Carlos eventually began dating, cultivated the necessary social skills, and learned to avoid interpreting each man’s reaction to him as a referendum on his worth. Eventually, he moved in with a guy who was handsome and affectionate but not as irresistible as the fantasy guys he continued to stalk in his imagination. This man wanted to love him, and Carlos’s greatest achievement was the decision to receive that affection. If you’re pursuing any kind of erotic transition, large or small, I have a prediction. One day you’ll look back on how far you’ve come and wonder how you did it. I doubt that you’ll recall one pivotal turning point, except perhaps the decision to begin. Like Carlos, most likely you’ll recall a series of unfamiliar and awkward experiments, opportunities seized in spite of—or because of—the risks. Through these experiments you turn the promise of change into a reality. STEP 7:INTEGRATE YOUR DISCOVERIESIf alternative erotic styles are to be more than passing experiments, they must become woven into the fabric of your everyday life. For a lucky few, this integration occurs with relative ease. Especially when modifications are readily satisfying and don’t seriously conflict with older patterns, merely repeating pleasurable new behaviors may be sufficient to establish them. For most people, however, it’s not that easy. I’ve observed dozens of men and women attempt new forms of erotic expression, only to revert to less fulfilling but more predictable ways of being. They found that the most daunting aspect of an erotic transition wasn’t trying new behaviors but making these changes stick. Unless you learn how to do this, your discoveries from the previous steps may, in the end, prove to be futile. Few if any of us follow an uninterrupted path toward our goals. More commonly, we make headway until we come up against some internal or external blockage that tests our motivation. At such moments we may feel as if we’re going backward. These setbacks are among the most common impediments to our development. But it’s not the setbacks themselves that hinder growth. Far more important is how we respond to them. Some people quickly become demoralized, interpret their setbacks as signs of weakness, or perhaps even abandon their goals. When you encounter a setback, I encourage you to view it not as a failure but as an opportunity to integrate change at a deeper level where it’s more likely to take root and flourish. Sometimes this is simply a matter of recognizing reversals as thoroughly human and inevitable, and deciding to persist in spite of them—with as little self-criticism as possible. But I’ve learned from my clients that persistent setbacks serious enough to undermine positive change are, more often than not, signs that a person must wrestle with one or both of two crucial questions: (1) What is the relationship between the changes I seek and how I perceive myself? and (2) How do I deal with my old turn-ons as I practice new ones?

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  You have to get to a clearing. Somewhere they can see you. But all around me there are trees. I’ve walked so far. I am in the thickest of thickets. I can reach out and touch the nearest tree trunk with my pinkie. Did I stop here because I thought it would be warmer? Did I just collapse? I can’t remember. But I hear a helicopter whipping the air, and I have to make them see me. I utilize the nearest tree trunk and pull myself to my feet. I stumble forward, heading in the direction I came from. I can see my prints in the snow. I think I remember a thicket just ahead. One where I could see the sky. It’s farther than I thought, and by the time I reach it and tilt my head back, I can’t hear the Whump-Whump quite as clearly as before. Not enough time to build a fire. I picture myself crouched in the snow whittling away at a pile of wood, and laugh. Too late to go back to the house, how long have I been out her? I’ve lost all concept of time. Two days? Three? Then I think it. Isaac is alive! He sent them. There is nothing to do but to stand in the clearing, head tilted up, and wait. I am airlifted to the nearest hospital in Anchorage. There are already news trucks outside. I see flashes and hear slamming doors and voices before I am wheeled on the gurney through the back door and into a private room. Nurses and doctors in salmon-colored scrubs come rushing toward me. I am compelled to roll off the gurney and hide. There are too many people. I want to tell them that I’m fine. I’m a death escapist. There is no need for this many medical professionals or this many tests. Their faces are serious; they are concentrating on saving me. There’s nothing really left for them to save. Nevertheless, needles slide into my arms over and over until I can’t even feel them anymore. They make me comfortable in a private room, with only an IV to keep me company. The nurses ask how I feel, but I don’t know what to tell them. I know that my heart is beating and that I am not cold anymore. They tell me that I’m dehydrated, undernourished. I want to say, “No shit” but I can’t form words yet. After a few hours they feed me. Or they try to. Simple food that my hollow stomach can handle: bread and something that is white and mushy. I push the food aside and ask for coffee. They say, “No.” When I try to stand up and tell them that I’m getting my own, they bring me coffee.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/”** and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  We must teach children at least as much about their strengths as about their vulnerabilities. When we encourage them to act more innocent than they really are, we do them a grave injustice. Of course, we fervently wish that our kids could inherit a less risky world. But with deep-rooted self-worth, clear information, consistent care—and a little luck—they will be equipped to cope with the hard realities of sex and love. SELF-ASSESSMENTUnless you come to terms with the unfinished business of your own childhood, you will unwittingly pass along the same erroneous lessons about sex you learned long ago. Think about how your own sexual development could have been more effectively nourished. What do wish your parents or other sex educators had explained or done for you? What do you wish they hadn’t said or done? If you could undo their mistakes, which ones would head your list? It’s one thing to have complaints but quite another to avoid repeating them. The best way to start is to treat yourself as you wish others had treated you. Then you will have a new foundation from which to nurture. It will help if you write down what you would most like to communicate about sex to the children you love. At the very least, lay out a few basic principles for how you intend to foster your child’s sexual development. A variety of thoughtful books can guide you.5 APPRECIATING EROTIC DIVERSITYNo one who explores honestly the innermost realities of his or her eroticism finds complete “normalcy.” Show me a person who claims to be free of sexual quirks and eccentricities and I’ll show you someone tragically inhibited, more robotic than human. When we deny or reject our sexual idiosyncrasies we renounce who we are. Erotically healthy people accept and appreciate their sexual uniqueness rather than fearing or fighting it. Our quirkiest quirks typically show up in the theater of the mind, so accepting them is easier for those who have successfully differentiated fantasy from behavior. To the extent that we feel safe and sexually free we will also reveal some, but probably not all, of our true preferences to our partners. Conversely, when we feel obligated to measure up to our partner’s real or imagined expectations, we censor ourselves and thereby limit the amount of pleasure we can give and receive.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,* the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival. We have chosen each other and the edge of each others battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting.** * Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980. * From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, An African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in Black Books Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980).* Seabury Press, New York, 1970.** From “Outlines,” unpublished poem. The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism*Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied. Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  -So I have, watching someone masturbate, fingering, finger popping, oral sex on a vulva, touching one's own genitals for pleasure, naked massage, kissing, teabagging, digital pleasure to a vulva or anus, a harmonica job, and then the last one we have on there is penis anus sex without a condom. [Alex] You heard him say "harmonica job," right? They aren't kidding when they said this would be comprehensive. The purpose of this exercise is to list any sex acts that come to mind and think through the risk for infection or pregnancy. Next, youth leader Sofia went over ways to reduce that risk. -Rolling over the head of the penis. I don't know how many of you have seen a female condom. ...into the vagina and making sure that it goes back to the cervical wall. Right here is a dental dam. A lot of people think that if you use lube you're not doing your job right. That is incorrect. We need to know this information. Whether you're choosing to have sex, to not have sex, you need that information so that you can make good, informed choices. And your decision can be to not have sex. That is still something that we teach. Abstinence is still a good option for a lot of people. [Alex] How is your relationship with your parents? Do your parents know what you're doing? -My dad comes and picks me up and drives me home. And we have conversations about the things that we go over in teen council, and I think that that's been so beneficial because I didn't have those conversations before with my dad. I think it's hard for parents sometimes to realize that, you know, your kids are thinking about sex. Your kids are getting on birth control, all those sorts of things. I think that that's something that's hard for parents and teen council has really helped my relationship with my parents. Yeah, any questions? -It's heartwarming to hear how sex education is strengthening Sofia's relationship with her parents. Because at her age, my inability to talk to my parents damn near killed me. [Alex] And I kept hearing that silence is the problem. -The silence is as loud as the words that we speak. -Universally, we want what's best for our children. We want to keep them safe. And in our urge to keep them safe, we keep information from them as though that will somehow keep them safer. -Kids pick up on, there are things we talk about, there are things that we don't. -Like vulva is the proper term for it, but hardly anybody ever uses that. I don't know why, but it's a body part. -You have to be a pretty open-minded, sexually confident parent not to instill a sense of shame around sex. And many parents struggle with that. And it's through no fault of their own. That's probably how they were raised as well.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  DRESSING AND UNDRESSINGAsk someone to tell you an erotic story and there’s a very good chance you’ll hear something about clothing. Not only do our styles of dress portray the image we want to present to the world, but dress is also a concealment, a cloaking of the treasures that lie underneath. In this sense clothing is an obstacle. In the transition from clothed to naked we expose ourselves to each other in more ways than one. The partners uncover each other with a ravenous need to see more, to feel more, and to be seen in return. Passions sometimes demand that clothes be unceremoniously ripped out of the way. For many people, however, the transition from fully clothed to completely naked is much more exciting when it is slow and deliberate. These men and women often feel equally or even more excited when they’re making out partially clothed on the sofa than when they’re completely nude in bed. Unfortunately, when a person who savors leisurely undressing is paired with someone who wants to get naked as quickly as possible, frustration is sure to follow. UNCERTAINTY AND HOPEBoth lusty and limerent attractions can be unilateral; it is possible to be drawn to someone who is indifferent toward you, oblivious to your feelings, or even unaware that you exist. If you’re like most people, though, you want at least some response from the object of your desire. Limerence, of course, aches for total reciprocation. But Dr. Tennov made a fascinating observation based on her research about the special role of uncertainty and doubt in the formation of romantic attachments. The craving for reciprocation from the limerent object is the essence of the romantic desire, yet she has found that without the experience of doubt, without the risk of rejection, the limerent response may not fully crystallize.11 In Tennov’s words: Indeed, too early a declaration on the limerent’s part or, on the other hand, too early evidence of reciprocation on the LO’s part may prevent the development of the full limerent reaction. Something must happen to break a totally positive interaction. Not that totally positive reactions are without highly redeeming features in themselves; it is only that they stop the progression to full or maximum limerence.12 And so it appears that the possibility of unrequited love is a necessary piece of the romantic puzzle. Even in the most idyllic romantic relationships, one or both partners will have moments of doubt about whether they have climbed out too far on a limb, perhaps only to be left there, defenseless and alone. Therefore, those in the throes of romantic passion are inevitably preoccupied with the concepts of “forever” and “always.” If you have any doubts about this, notice how frequently these words occur in popular romantic songs.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He took up acting at the Geller Theater Workshop, paid for in part by the VA, but that didn’t satisfy him. There was a larger plan stirring in his imagination. “I was hiding behind the horrible secret. And that is I was trying to find out what the mind was all about,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even tell my friends; they didn’t understand. They said, ‘Here’s Hubbard, he’s leading a perfectly wonderful life. He gets to associate with movie actresses. He knows hypnotism and so has no trouble with editors. He has apartments and stuff.’ ” IT WAS THE LARVAL STAGE of Hubbard’s astonishing transformation—from the depressed, rejected, impoverished, creatively exhausted figure he paints in the Affirmations, to his nearly overnight success as a thinker and founder of an international movement when his book Dianetics was finally published. He wrote his friend Robert Heinlein, “I will soon, I hope give you a book risen from the ashes of the old Excalibur which details in full the mathematics of the human mind, solves all the problems of the ages, and gives six recipes for aphrodisiacs and plays the mouth organ with the left foot.” He writes a little about recovering from the war, then remarks, “The main difficulty these days is getting sane again. I find out that I am making progress. Of course there is always the danger that I will get too sane to write.” He is angling for a Guggenheim grant for his book on psychology. Meantime, he was so pressed financially that he begged Heinlein for a loan of fifty dollars. “Golly, I never was so many places in print with less to show for it,” Hubbard complained. “I couldn’t buy a stage costume for Gypsy Rose Lee.” Hubbard was writing these letters from Savannah, Georgia, in the waning days of 1948 and the spring of 1949. He said he was volunteering in a psychiatric clinic at St. Joseph’s Medical Center, “getting case histories at the request of the American Psychiatric Assoc.” It is a shadowy period in his life, but it was in Savannah that he began to sketch out the principles that would form the basis of his understanding of the human mind. He claimed to be getting phenomenal results on nearly every malady he addressed. “One week ago I brought in my first asthma cure,” he writes to Heinlein. “I have an arthritis to finish tomorrow and so it goes.” It’s unclear whether Hubbard himself was receiving treatment in Savannah. “My hip and stomach and side are well again,” he writes to Heinlein, adding that he is “straightening out the kinks that have held down production on the money machine.” In his letters, Hubbard continually speculates about the book he hopes to finish soon. “It ain’t agin religion,” he boasts to Heinlein. “It just abolishes it....

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety. Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of changeability, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child. Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Resist the urge to edit as you write. Grant yourself freedom to be as irrational as you want. This map is for your eyes only, so no one else is going to judge it. Once you’ve listed everything you can think of, place a star next to the items about which you currently feel most strongly. Now you have a picture of where you’re trying to go, why you want to get there, and the roadblocks you’re likely to encounter along the way. Keep in mind that goals and motivations are not static. Expect them to evolve as you become increasingly experimental. One of the advantages of writing all this down is that you can return to it, refining your list as you move along. See Maggie’s motivational map on the previous page. Notice how she has succinctly summarized all the key elements for her erotic growth. STEP 2:CULTIVATE SELF-AFFIRMATIONThose who set out to alter a troublesome turn-on commonly begin in a self-critical posture, vigorously focusing on what’s wrong with them. They doggedly cling to the conviction that somehow their judgments will bring about change. This mistaken belief is a major impediment to growth. I’m not denying that constructive self-criticism can be a valuable stimulus for action. But when self-demeaning thoughts and feelings predominate, they ultimately sabotage your innate capacities for healing. The only alternative is to cultivate the ways of self-affirmation. To affirm yourself is, first and foremost, to assert your right to take up space in the world. Beyond that, it is an ongoing process of developing and expressing more of your truest self. Many confuse self-affirmation with narcissism, a preoccupation with oneself that makes it difficult to recognize anyone else’s feelings and needs. In fact, narcissistic adults who seek continual recognition and praise are trying to compensate for a lack of genuine self-affirmation. FROM STRUGGLE TO CONSENSUSThe moment you decide to make a change you initiate a series of interactions among two or more internal aspects of yourself. Perhaps one part of you has reached the end of its rope and is now desperate for change no matter how difficult, while another part clings to familiar patterns in spite of the pain and dissatisfaction they cause. Yet another part may only be concerned that you conform to external standards of behavior. Ever since I successfully quit smoking after countless failed attempts, I’ve been fascinated by how people prepare themselves for change. Everyone I talk to who’s made a difficult transition instantly understands what I mean when I say that I was able to quit smoking because my entire being eventually came to an inner consensus. But I have yet to meet anyone who can explain exactly what this consensus is or how it is reached. Of two things I am sure. First, within you is a unifying force known as the Self that holds the key to reducing destructive internal conflicts.1 Second, compassion is the master emotion of positive change.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Because soldiers constantly faced the possibility of an untimely death, there was much speculation about the afterlife. There had been no detailed end-time scenario in the Quran, and paradise had been described only in vaguely poetic terms. But now some ahadith claimed that the wars of conquest heralded the Last Days61 and imagined Muhammad speaking as a doomsday prophet: “Behold! God has sent me with a sword, just before the Hour.”62 Muslim warriors are depicted as an elite vanguard fighting the battles of the end time.63 When the end came, all Muslims would have to abandon the ease of settled life and join the army, which would not only defeat Byzantium but complete the conquest of Central Asia, India, and Ethiopia. Some soldiers were dreaming of martyrdom, and the ahadith supplemented with Christian imagery the Quran’s brief remarks about the fate of those who die in battle.64 Like the Greek martus, the Arabic shahid meant “one who bears witness” to Islam by making the ultimate surrender. Ahadith list his heavenly rewards: he would not have to wait in the grave for the Last Judgment like everybody else, but would ascend immediately to a special place in paradise. In the sight of God the martyr has six [unique] qualities: He [God] forgives him at the first opportunity, and shows him his place in paradise; he is saved from the torment of the grave, he is safe from the great fright [of the Last Judgment], a crown of honor is placed upon his head—one ruby of which is better than the world and all that is in it—he is married to 72 of the houris [women of paradise], and he gains the right to intercede [with God] for 70 of his relatives.65 As a reward for his hard life in the army, the martyr will drink wine, wear silk clothes, and bask in the sexual delights he had forsaken for the jihad. But other Muslims, who were not so wedded to the new military ideal, would insist that any untimely death was a martyrdrom: drowning, plague, fire, or accident also “bore witness” to human finitude, showing that there was no security in the human institutions in which people put their trust but only in the illimitable God.66

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  This can mean, of course, that the self-attribu tion of this power is a resolutely atheist doctrine, the arrogation to man of power s formerly confined to God. Thi s will be so with Nietzsche, whom we'll look at in a minute. But this doesn't have to be so. One of the most insightful thinkers to explore this power is Dostoyevsky, who sees it in a Christian perspective. In fact the notion of a transformation of o ur stance towards the world w hereb y our vision of it is changed has been traditio nally connected with the notion o f g race. Augustine holds that in relation to God, love has to p recede knowledge. With the right directio n of love, things become evident which are hidden otherwise. What is new is the modern sense of the place and power o f the creative imagination. This is now an integral part of the goodness of things, and hence the transformation of our stance and thus our outlook helps t o bring about the truth it reveals. Now this idea may but does n ' t have to be given an atheist formulation. Whether it does or not depends on whether we go on seeing ourselves as dep endent on God for this transformation. But those who affirm this dependence, like Dostoyevsky, just a s those who do not, like Nietzsche, have a thorou ghly modern conception of what the transformation involves. This conception has it s roots in the post-Romantic notion of the creative imagi n at ion, which helps complete what it reveals. Let us turn briefly to three influential nineteenth-century writers who illustrate this issue of self affi rmation: Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. In Either I Or, Kierkegaard lays out the idea of an aesthetic transfiguration of life, only to trump it with a higher form, the ethical. The ethical we attain by cho osing ourselves in the light of infinity. As against the aesthet ic man , who is carried on from one finite thing to another and is fully occupied with these, who in a sense makes no ch o ices, or only chooses among finite things i n fi nite co nt e x ts , the eth ical man trul y chooses himself. He chooses himself 450 • SUBTLER LANG U A GE S infinitely; that is, the choice is not for the sake of any finite thing but, on th e contrary, all finite things get their value and significance from this choice. This cha n ge of stance which Kierkegaard calls choosing ourselve s brin gs about a reversal which can be called a transfigurati o n. All the elemen ts in my life may be the same, but they are now transfigured because chosen in th e light of the infinite.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  They would get the wealth, happiness, and success that they desired only if everybody behaved toward one another with equity and transcended self-interest. Rulers had to “learn not to be concerned for themselves alone.” 66 If they were selfish and violent, they would incur the wrath of Heaven. Unlike Confucius, who preferred not to speak about Heaven, Mozi backed up nearly every one of his arguments with a reference to the High God. Heaven loved all human beings without distinction and was the exemplary model of jian ai. “Heaven is all embracing and not selfish,” Mozi insisted. Heaven is generous and ungrudging; Heaven’s understanding is eternal and never declines. . . . Heaven displays its love of all men by giving them all life and sustaining them. If one flouts Heaven, Heaven will inflict calamities. Because the sages made Heaven their standard, all their actions were effective. 67 The aristocracy had long been moving toward an impersonal conception of the divine, but Mozi probably expressed the beliefs of the ordinary people, who still saw Heaven as a personalized deity. Yet despite his strong, literal-minded beliefs in God and the Spirits, Mozi had very little religious feeling. Unlike Confucius, Mozi felt no awe or wonder in the presence of Heaven. His theology was as grimly practical as his ethics. Heaven was useful. Heaven could pressure people into the belief that they must cultivate a concern for everybody, or suffer the consequences. If everybody could be persuaded to respect others as they did themselves, there would be peace and harmony throughout the world. Nobody could raze a city to the ground or massacre the population of a village if he practiced jian ai. Mozi was at his most eloquent when he described this utopia: Now if we seek to benefit the world by taking jian ai as our standard, those with sharp ears and clear eyes will see and hear for others, those with sturdy limbs will work for others, and those with a knowledge of the Way will endeavor to teach others. Those who are old and without wives and children will find means of support and be able to live out their days; the young and orphaned who have no parents will find someone to care for them and look after their needs. 68 Mozi did not believe that this was an impossible dream. Throughout this chapter, he repeatedly exclaimed: “When all these benefits may be secured merely by taking jian ai as our standard, I cannot understand how the men of the world can hear about this doctrine and still criticize it!” 69 The sage kings had founded an empire based on universal altruism; the ideal had worked in the past, and could do so again. It was possible to change the world, he argued, and men of worth must rise to the challenge. During the Warring States period, Mozi was more widely revered than Confucius, because he spoke directly to the terror and violence of his time.