Joy

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 Come As You Are (2015)

  Armed with the decision to start paying attention just to what it feels like, Laurie went to a weekend mindfulness retreat called something like Awakening the Feminine Divine. She practiced yoga and slept nine hours a night. She ate mindfully. She breathed mindfully. She shared her feelings with strangers, made new friends, and found a renewed sense that she was not alone in her struggles. And, let me just emphasize this, because Laurie would want me to: She slept nine hours a night. She focused for twenty-one hours (the time she wasn’t sleeping) on really noticing what it felt like to be alive and move through the world. And she came back a new woman. “I can’t be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love if I can’t even be a source of joy for myself,” she announced. “And what I want, more than anything, is to be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love.” “Wait a second, Johnny and I and everyone else who loves you, we’ve all been saying that for months,” I said. “What did they do to you at that retreat?” “I stood in the Divine Gaze of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Auspiciousness, and I felt my own power and beauty,” she recited seriously. Then she cracked a grin and said, “You’ll probably tell me that’s just a metaphor for activating something or other in my mesolimbic whatever, but I don’t give a damn about the science. It frickin’ worked.” This chapter is about the science Laurie doesn’t give a damn about. It frickin’ works. Here we are in the final chapter. So far we’ve learned that in some important ways your sexual response may not follow the “standard narrative” of sexual functioning: You may have more or less sensitive brakes and a more or less sensitive accelerator. Your genital response may not predict your subjective experience of being “turned on.” Your sexual desire may emerge in response to pleasure, rather than in anticipation of pleasure. All of which may come as a surprise if you’re among the 10–20 percent of women whose sexual response is similar to the “standard narrative.” (We also learned that people, especially women, vary widely from each other and change substantially across their life spans.) Which brings me to confidence and joy. “Confidence and joy” is a phrase I’ve used a lot for many years, but it didn’t become the core of my work until, one semester, a student raised her hand in the middle of a lecture and said, “Wait, Emily. Could you please define those terms? What are confidence and joy?” “Uh…” I said. “Let me get back to you.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Second, though there wasn’t much she could do to reduce the actual stressors in her life, she reduced her stress by taking more deliberate effort to decompress and complete the stress response cycles that life activated. She let herself cry. She slowed down her showers, paid attention to the sensation of the water on her skin, and instead of slapping on body lotion like she was greasing a loaf pan, she paid attention to how nice it felt and how healthy her skin was. As she exercised, she visualized her stress as that orange monster in the Bugs Bunny cartoon—the one Bugs gives a manicure—and imagines herself running away from the monster, through her front door, and into Johnny’s arms. She started experiencing the discharge of stress as pleasurable—or at least not a source of suffering. And finally, she became much gentler with herself when she noticed herself being self-critical about her body or feeling guilty about pleasure. She didn’t say to herself, “Stop it!” She just thought, “Yup. There are the self-critical thoughts again.” She practiced nonjudgment. Perhaps these three changes would not have lasted as they have if it weren’t for Johnny recognizing the opportunity in all of this. Once he clicked onto the idea of turning off her offs, he started noticing more and more things he could do to help Laurie let go of the brakes. Sometimes it was a simple thing like doing the dishes and wiping down the kitchen counters. Sometimes it was, “Let’s take a night off of worry ing about whether we’re going to have sex and just lie together and talk.” Sometimes it was setting up a date night with plenty of time for her to unwind. Higher-desire partners might think, “She should just be able to want it as much as I do!” They have negative feelings about their partner’s sexual feelings. But Johnny realized it’s not about just wanting sex, it’s about creating a context—really, it’s about creating a life—that makes space for both people’s needs. He brought a sense of curiosity to the puzzle of turning off the offs. He brought a sense of wonder to the surprising way Laurie’s sexuality can spring and blossom from fallow winter ground. He brought a sense of awe to the ecstatic way her passion overflows the garden walls, under the loving warm rain and sun of the right context. Joy is the hard part. As a matter of fact, even writing this chapter about joy has been the hardest part of writing this book. Joy isn’t obvious or simple. It isn’t a destination you arrive at and it isn’t “the journey.” It’s how you feel about your journey toward your truest erotic self. You are allowed to love your sexuality as it is right now, even—especially—if it’s not what somebody else says it “should” be.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  And then she started having sex, and eventually even liking it! So she opened up a new area on the map, explored new territory. She created space for the idea of sex as recreation, a fun thing to do on a Friday night, as long as X-Files wasn’t on. She redrew the map to allow for both being smart and enjoying sex as a source of pleasure, but still she was navigating through a fairly narrow band of terrain. It was only when she met the man she would eventually marry that she began experiencing sex as something through which she could discover human connection and a deeper pleasure than mere entertainment, a pleasure connected to her personhood.3 This was a whole new map, which included terrain she had never known existed—though it had been there the whole time, unexplored. She’s been with the same partner for decades and has had many of the same pleasures and struggles that so many women experience in long-term relationships. And while I had the great good fortune of becoming a sex educator, she had the good fortune of having a sex educator for a sister, so she could be among the women who called me or emailed me to say, “Is this normal?” She’s like a lot of women—context-sensitive desire and nonconcordant arousal. And so, like a lot of women, she sent my blog posts to her husband and said, “This! See?” We’re an example of how even genetically identical gardens, planted with very similar seeds, may still grow into very different terrains. It turns out she’s got slightly more sensitive brakes than I do, and I’ve got a slightly more sensitive accelerator. So perhaps the Media Message was a slightly better fit for my native sexuality and the Moral Message a slightly better fit for Amelia’s, and so different ideas took root and grew. For both of us, by the time we began having sex with partners, we had some set ideas about what that experience was supposed to be like. And both us of, like nearly all women, went through a time of realizing how poorly prepared we were and then relearning what it meant to be a sexual woman. For both of us, education about the science of sexual wellbeing helped us draw maps that better represent our sexual terrains, which in turn allowed us to communicate about our sexual wellbeing more effectively with our partners. It also helped us let go of judging other women for having experiences that contradicted our own—because it turns out everyone really is just different. But it was our willingness to believe our own internal experience, even when it didn’t match what we thought we “should” be experiencing, that empowered us to embrace that science—the science in this book.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  But what science can’t give you is permission to experience ecstatic pleasure. In the end, that’s the key to spectacular orgasms. And only you can give you that. Science can’t tell you how to feel about your orgasms. Science can tell you only that how you feel about your orgasms changes your orgasms. Science can tell you that feeling shame, judgment, frustration, and fear about orgasm will diminish your orgasmic experience, while acceptance, welcoming, confidence, and joy will expand your orgasmic experience. Science can tell you that your brain is like a collective of desires, and the more the collective collaborates, the more of you can move toward ecstasy. But not one word of that science makes you more or less entitled to the pleasure of your own skin and mind and heart. Your orgasms belong to you, and all the science in the world can’t make you more delighted with them or more afraid of them or more curious about them. The science can’t do that. Only you can do that. You were born entitled to all the pleasure your body can feel. You were born entitled to pleasure in whatever way your body receives it, in whatever contexts afford it, and in whatever quantities you want it. Your pleasure belongs to you, to share or keep as you choose, to explore or not as you choose, to embrace or avoid as you choose. So, if you wanted to, how would you find your way to ecstasy? How would you get all the birds flying together in the same direction? Patience, practice, and a sex-positive context. You already know how to create a sex-positive context. And you understand how to build patience—by training your little monitor to make sure you’ve got the right goal, the right kind and quantity of effort, and the right criterion velocity. Which leaves us with the “practice” part. Practice what? Practice turning off the offs. Here’s how: The brain states that are dragging parts of your flock away from orgasm— stress, worry, spectatoring, chronically wondering if your kid is going to knock on the door, or even just literal cold feet or other physical discomfort—need to be taken seriously and have their needs met. They need to be respected and treated like the sleepy hedgehog from chapter 4. Be kind and gentle with each of the offs, listen to what they need in order to feel satisfied, and then satisfy them. Go back to your context worksheets: What hits your brakes? Consider the things in your environment and also your own thoughts and feelings. What context do you need in order to turn off those offs?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The short answer to this question, as well as the reason the story of Luther is unlike any other, is that he felt that after tremendous and agonized searching he finally—by God’s grace—had found that thing for which every human since Eden had pined. He had found the hermeneutical lever with which the whole world could be raised to the height of heaven. This had been the principal problem of all humanity—how to bridge the infinite abyss between imperfect mankind and a perfect God, between earth and heaven, between death and life. And Luther’s discovery was that this problem had been solved by the promised Messiah of the Jews fifteen hundred years before. In its way, the discovery was more a rediscovery. And it all amounted to only this: by simple faith one could accept God’s diagnosis and solution to the otherwise insoluble problem, and at the moment one did this, the problem was instantly solved. After wandering in the wilderness for centuries, the people of God could be led by this new Moses into the Promised Land. Luther further came to see that to do anything but accept this notion as itself utterly sufficient would be to whistle past the graveyard. It would be to behave as though we might in some way add to what God had already done, which would itself destroy our ability to benefit from it. So like some madman—and yet one who understood he had unaccountably been given the honor of great knowledge—he dedicated every subsequent second of his life and spent every calorie of energy available to spreading these world-changing tidings. He did it fearlessly, too, but not because he was traditionally brave; rather, because in this discovery, he had also come to see that death itself had been soundly and forever defeated and that this was in fact the central point of what he was saying. So taken together, Martin Luther’s is as dramatic a tale from history as one can discover, and as one should expect, its ramifications in history and for us today are similarly dramatic. How it was that Martin Luther came to rediscover this greatest of good news and how he then spent his life publishing it abroad in the wide world is the story that follows. CHAPTER ONEBeyond the MythsTHERE IS NO beginning to the story of Martin Luther. This is because in telling the genuinely extraordinary story of a genuinely extraordinary human being, one immediately stumbles over two perfect conundrums, both of which make a clean beginning impossible. One is calendric, and the other is so odd that it can hardly help seeming more than coincidental.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  WritingLuther’s room at the Wartburg contained a tiled oven for warmth, a simple desk and chair, of which he made ample use, and one especially curious object, likely a gift from Frederick, via Spalatin, though any letter in which it is referenced has been lost. It was the gargantuan vertebra of a whale, doubtless from the remains of a cetacean that had beached or washed up someplace very far away, probably on the coast of the North Sea. Whale bones were at that time prized for their healing powers, and one assumes that because Luther complained so regularly of the various maladies affecting him, Spalatin had found it and sent it along as a happy surprise and encouragement. And how could Luther help to have been cheered by something as outrageous and singular as this colossal white bone from a leviathan that once swam endless miles beneath the waves of a distant sea? Luther had never seen the ocean, and never would in his life, so the exotic quality of the object must have been all the greater. One assumes Luther put his feet upon it as he sat at his desk during the endless hours he spent there writing and writing.* The amount of writing Luther did during what would stretch to ten months in the lofty castle beggars the imagination. To be fair, there was little else he could do while he was there. He was unable to regale his friends in person and unable to lecture and preach several times per week as he used to do. Before his tonsure and beard had grown out, he was even unable to walk anyplace beyond the courtyard of the castle, nor could he even do this much for fear of appearing aimless and drawing attention to himself with the other knights there. Whatever he did, he mustn’t appear outside his room with a book. That would be a dead giveaway that he wasn’t a knight at all, for books were such newfangled objects at that time that they weren’t so easily come by, and few noble knights would spend their time with one. Eventually, Luther would be able now and again to take horse rides through the forests that stretched in every direction, but always with a servant or two alongside who must scour the woods for trouble. He was even allowed to walk on the forested paths around the Wartburg to pick strawberries—something he had done as a youth not far from there while in Eisenach with his relatives—but always accompanied by the two noble pages entrusted to him by Berlepsch. But because Luther really had little at all that he must do, he leaped headlong into the opportunity to scratch ink onto paper and wrote furiously, accomplishing more in his ten months of seclusion than many writers do in a lifetime.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Kathie was an energetic, bright, and eminently resourceful person. Their marriage was duly and officially consummated on the night of June 13, and already in October Kathie was showing early signs of pregnancy. They would have six children. But the idea that a monk and a nun were to have a child together struck many as tempting fate. Surely God would show his displeasure for their unholy union, but how? Just what ungodly freak would spring from this dark coupling? Would their child be a monster like the Papal Ass or the Monk’s Calf—or like the headless child supposed to be born in Wittenberg in the previous year? In fact, the most prevalent rumor that circulated in Saxony at that time was that the product of any such union must be a two-headed horror. On June 7, 1526, Luther’s first son was born, happily lacking a second head. Luther could not contain his joy at his first child’s birth, and the very next day he wrote to his friend Johannes Rühel in Eisleben, where Johannes Agricola also lived at that time: Please tell Master Eisleben [Johannes Agricola] on my behalf, that yesterday, on the day which is called Dat* at two o’clock, my dear Kathie, by God’s grace, gave to me a Hansen Luther. Tell him not to be surprised that I approach him with such news, for he should bear in mind what it is to have sun* at this time of year. Please greet your dear sun-bearer, and Eisleben’s Else. I commend you herewith to God. Amen. Just as I am writing this, my weak Kathie is asking for me. Martin Luther23 They named him Hans, after his godfather Johannes Bugenhagen and also after Luther’s own father, Johannes, who was also called Hans. In the child’s first years, however, he would be called Hänschen, the diminutive version of the name. The child was baptized a mere two hours after he emerged from his mother’s womb. CHAPTER EIGHTEENErasmus, Controversy, MusicErasmus is an eel. —Martin Luther

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Music is a fair and lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved me to the joy of preaching. St. Augustine was troubled in conscience whenever he caught himself delighting in music, which he took to be sinful. He was a choice spirit, and were he living today would agree with us. I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people gay; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. Next after theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor. I would not exchange what little I know of music for something great. Experience proves that next to the Word of God only music deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart. We know that to the devils music is distasteful and insufferable. My heart bubbles up and overflows in response to music, which has so often refreshed me and delivered me from dire plagues.18 Luther clearly wished to bring the good news of Christ into every aspect of the world so that the leaven of the Gospel could touch everything, as it was meant to do. As the nineteenth-century Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper had said, “There is not one square inch in all of creation over which Jesus Christ does not say ‘mine!’”19 So everything would be redeemed, including the desire of the common man and woman to sing. But Luther had a very practical consideration in this too. He knew that the best way to inculcate the truths of Scripture into the minds of every man, woman, and child was to put good doctrine into musical forms. If they heard things preached from the pulpit and had them reinforced by their own readings of Scripture and their readings of Luther’s catechisms, that was all well and good. But how wonderful it would be if all of that was further reinforced in congregational hymns. However, there had been no new hymns for many centuries, so Luther was in a hurry to create some. He wrote many of them himself. But he also cast his net far and wide for assistance in this grand project. At the end of 1523, Luther wrote to Spalatin, asking for help in translating some psalms into hymns:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Odder far than the idea that these marriages were consummated before the weddings was the idea that they must be consummated in full view of a witness. So after the small ceremony, the couple were escorted to their bedroom in the cloister, where Jonas did the curious honors, watching the two become one flesh literally and figuratively. He wept to see it, knowing the huge significance of it all on every level. There was often an observation deck above the bed, though this detail seems not to have been observed in this case. It seems more likely that Jonas simply stood someplace in the room, silently beseeching the Lord of hosts not to abandon him to a coughing fit or sneeze. From our vantage point, this scenario cubes whatever ideas we have concerning awkwardness, but for those in Luther’s day who were not prudes about the facts of life, and who considered the marriage bed not less than holy, and who saw in the physical union of man and woman a living picture of the union between the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, and his Bride, the church, it was a real place and real time where heaven bowed down to kiss the earth, where alpha embraced omega, and where the dewy newness of Eden was rediscovered. And out of this came that which was impossible, the bounteous miracle of life itself. “Yesterday,” Jonas wrote to a friend, “I was present and saw the bridegroom on the bridal bed—I could not suppress my tears at the sight.”11 In the morning, Kathie—already leaping into her role as lady of the house—provided breakfast for the handful of guests. Presumably at Cranach’s suggestion, the city council presented the young couple with no small amount of wine for this meal. There was a gallon of Rhine wine, a gallon of sweet Madeira, and one and a half gallons of Franconia wine. No one knows why Melanchthon was not invited to the June 13 ceremony, but we do know he disapproved of the marriage, so perhaps Luther intuited this and wished to spare himself and his friend the emotions of their disagreement. Nonetheless, Melanchthon was upset not to have been invited or notified. Our only record of his pique is in a letter three days later to his friend Camerarius, which was cryptically written in Greek:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed,” as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. Thus a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Hereupon I ran through the Scriptures from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “Righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.5 This is the earthshaking insight that gave Luther the solidest of all foundations in Scripture upon which to base what may well be reckoned the greatest revolution in human history. But by jesting in 1532 that it happened in that most humbling and humiliating of places—“upon the toilet”—Luther made it a perfect illustration of his theological foundation. That is because it is in keeping with everything he knew about the incarnated God of the Bible. The specific point here is that the infinite and omniscient and omnipotent creator God of heaven did not descend to earth on a golden cloud. He came to us through screaming pain, through the bloody agony of a maiden’s vagina, in a cattle stall filthy with and stinking of dung. This is how humans enter the world, and if God would enter the world as a human being, he must enter it that way. It was the only way to reach us where we are and as we are, and because of his love for us he did not shrink from this approach, vile and difficult as it must be.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Once we embrace Christ, we are instantly made righteous because of his righteousness, and not because of anything we have done or could do. So our good works do not earn us God’s favor. That favor we already possess, even though we are sinners who sin and cannot help sinning. By turning to God in faith—as sinners who understand that we are sinners—and by crying out for God’s help, we do all we can by acknowledging our helplessness. At this point—in which our faith acknowledges the truth of our situation—we are instantly clothed with the righteousness of God. And it is now our gratitude to God for this free gift of his righteousness and salvation that makes us want to please him with our good works. We do them not out of grievous and legalistic duty or out of a hope to earn his favor but out of sheer gratitude for the favor we already have. Our service to him is redeemed and transmuted into a free servitude. That is the power of faith in Christ. All that is base and dead can be redeemed by faith unto glory and life. Luther summed it up in this typically colorful image. “Is this not a joyous exchange,” he asks, “the rich, noble, pious bridegroom Christ takes this poor, despised wicked little whore in marriage, redeems her of all evil, and adorns her with all his goods?” Paul and Augustine might never have put it that way, but their theology implies it not merely strongly but inevitably and irresistibly and inescapably. Thus this foundational theological idea is the infinitely fecund soil out of which the whole world grows for Luther. If we as hell-bound sinners are redeemed wholly, then every ugly and vile thing in this world can be transformed and redeemed. So all that is in this world—including our bodies and every corporeal activity, including our sexuality—far from being things that must be escaped or transcended through our pious efforts, are things to be fully accepted with our open arms, and then with God’s open arms they are fully redeemed. All things, rather than be lost forever or discarded away into despised oblivion, are joyously and in every aspect redeemed unto God’s eternal glory. Eventually, this period of riotous productivity would end. The new emperor would finally turn his attention to Germany, and Rome would once again resume its furious efforts to catch the wild boar that had been cavorting so destructively in the pope’s delicate vineyards. CHAPTER NINEThe Bull Against LutherBecause you have confounded the truth of God, today the Lord confounds you. Into the fire with you! —Martin Luther, upon burning the papal bull

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Faith is a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God. . . . Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake his life on it a thousand times. This knowledge of and confidence in God’s grace makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and all creatures. And this is the work which the Holy Spirit performed in faith. Because of it, without compulsion, a person is ready and glad to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything out of love and praise to God who has shown him this grace. Thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire.25 Luther’s words in this preface so purely communicated what it meant to be “born anew” that more than two centuries hence, in May 1738, John Wesley heard them read aloud and instantly had a profound conversion experience.*26 This led to Wesley’s preaching this same Gospel message on a grand scale, which had tremendous historical ramifications, including the Methodist revival of the eighteenth century, which in turn led to the conversion of William Wilberforce, who led the battle to end the slave trade in the British Empire. It also led to the ministry and preaching of George Whitefield in the American colonies, which over several decades led to the unification of the colonies under the same egalitarian ideas as those that Germans were encountering in the early sixteenth century through the preaching of Luther and other Reformation preachers. Ideas have consequences, and Luther’s had more than most. CHAPTER FIFTEENMonsters, Nuns, and MartyrsNo natural exhalation in the sky, No scope of nature, no distemper’d day, No common wind, no customed event, But they will pluck away his natural cause And call them meteors, prodigies and signs, Abortives, presages and tongues of heaven. —Shakespeare, King John, 3.4 NOW AND AGAIN the world of Luther seems positively modern. Other times it seems anything but that, and the story of the Papal Ass and the Monk’s Calf is one of those times. In this same December 1522 in which Luther and Melanchthon were putting the finishing touches on Luther’s German New Testament, many miles to the east of Wittenberg, in the village of Waltersdorf, a certain cow gave birth to a severely deformed calf. Because the world of that time was keenly attuned to comets, anomalous births, and other potential portents in the skies and on the earth, this grotesque creature, which was said to look like a monk, drew much attention, and news of the bovine freak quickly spread. When the court astronomer in Prague learned of the creature, he immediately perceived that this monk’s calf was a clear omen referring to Martin Luther, so he wrote a poem on the subject that became popular in certain precincts. Luther, unsurprisingly, had another interpretation of the oddnik veal.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  This was our final offer. I was calling the next candidate if you said no again. How can I tell him that had I been negotiating, I’d have taken the first offer? Right before decamping, I go with a few women from my group plus Dev for a weekend on Cape Cod. He splashes in the waves with the ladies, and at night we boil lobsters and stuff ourselves with mounds of herb-sticky pasta. At dusk on Sunday, we all pat together an ornate sand castle with moats and levees and bridges. We mold bucket-shaped turrets. The courtyard’s tiled with seashells. The scene blows back to me now with a high, clear oboe note of joy, a feeling then so unfamiliar, it no doubt accounts for my vivid recollections of that day—the sound of Dev’s yellow shovel going shush, shush in wet sand. Behind us, winds in long grasses hiss. The sky is fading to purple with a fat sun red as a cough lozenge about to sink into the sea. I lounge in a low deck chair, a glass of lemonade jammed in the sand beside me. Dev’s hunched over, moving down our ranks, packing sand over each set of feet. Deb adds her own pebble toenails. Why didn’t I ever go on vacation before? I wonder. You and Warren never went? Liz asks. Just to his folks’ houses. We were always so broke, trying to find time to write. Deb says, Didn’t you go to the Vineyard once? That’s right, I say. See, I still fail to remember the good stuff very much. (In my head, I can hear Joan—who wasn’t there—say, Work on that.) Warren and I fought on the ferry going over, I remember, because he didn’t want our friends to come for the weekend. He wanted to write the whole time. So I pouted most of the week. You figured he was being stubborn, Deb says. But I was being—(I flounder for a word and hear Joan say stubborn)—stubborn. You could’ve taken other holidays, though, Deb says. Liz comes around with more lemonade and tops me off. That’s what our therapist says. Maybe we can swap houses with somebody in another city. Dev, done with patting sand on my feet, informs me it’s his garage; my feet are cars; I need to reverse them easy so the structure doesn’t collapse. I gingerly slide them out, and he whoops, then runs down to get a bucket of water. The sandpipers clear him a path. We watch him lug his bucket sloshing back and set it next to me. What’s this for? I say. To wash your feet off, he says. He dumps the cold water over my callused dogs. Deb says, This is how he’s gonna think women are—just lined up in front of him, cooing approval. Now bury my feet, he says. Soon as he slides down in the deck chair, though, his body folds in on itself. His head drops.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  He would have collapsed my lungs, ruptured my spleen, wailed on my mailbox.” Shute is a high school all-American in football and wrestling. “Oh, bullshit,” my friend says. “You got time to do a couple miles with me?” I ask as we hit the track. “Sure,” Kuch says, speeding up. After the first mile I realize I’m carrying the packsack. I fling it somewhere. Kuch is riding beside me. “You sure that wasn’t a portable TV?” he asks. “Console,” I spit. I’m beat. I begin to lengthen my strides. I suck the air in, count, then blow it out. I puff like an old steam barge. I go loose of mind and body and marvel at the clouds of vapor I emit. Through the pines there must be stars up there somewhere. I think of Dad’s stories about before Grand Coulee Dam, about when the Columbia was still a river, and about how the Colvilles camped at Kettle Falls and speared and netted the salmon and dried them close enough to where Dad lived that he could hear the flies buzzing around them as they dried. I see an old steam barge I’ve only seen in books go steaming up the Spokane, log booms flowing behind like the tail of a peacock. I see Puget Sound. Seattle long before the Space Needle. The lumber schooners docked at Port Blakely, once the biggest mill in the world. I see Shute steaming up the stadium steps with a console TV on his back. “Don’t lie down,” Kuch whispers. Snowflakes fall in wonderful cold explosions on my closed eyes. “Christ, you’ll catch a cold.” I grab the packsack he hands me. It’s like lifting the DeSoto. My head stops strobing by the time we reach our side of the park. I look back at David Thompson Park, thinking most of my life has revolved around this grass, these ball fields, pools, courts, slides, swings, schools. Kuch walks his bike. “I’ll run with you,” he says. “You do your three miles in the morning and we’ll do two more after practice.” “Gotta be to work by five thirty,” I say. “I forgot,” he says. “After work then. I’ll catch you on the way home.” “Right on!” I shout. “You my mainest man!” VIDad is asleep, with his little Sony portable still showing sports news. I turn it off. I turn off his light. “Night, Son.” Dad wheezes. “Night, Dad,” I whisper. * * * Carla is listening to her Johann Pachelbel record and studying for her child development test. She takes that and senior English and contemporary world problems at David Thompson. All she needs for her diploma is the English. I strip off my sweatshirt and throw it into the laundry room. It sticks to the wall. I do sweat still, if I work hard enough. I pull off my boots and step onto the scales—147. Jesus! I walk in to tell Carla, but she grabs me before I can speak.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Back to 9 ½, down to 9. By now, you’re constantly hovering around orgasm, holding yourself at the peak sexual tension your body can contain. That’s extended orgasm. Congratulations! With practice, you can stay there as long as you like, as long as your body can sustain, always noticing what you’re paying attention to and gently nudging your attention toward your body sensations. You’re a bit like a bathtub at this point, where the tension is trickling into you at exactly the same rate that it’s draining out. If it begins to trickle just a little bit more quickly than it’s draining out, you’ll cross the threshold and overflow. If it begins to drain just a bit more quickly than it’s trickling in, you’ll drift away from the peak. There is no such thing as failure here, only different kinds of success, because it’s all intense pleasure. This whole process might take forty-five minutes or an hour, and there will be Feelings, make no mistake. And even if you don’t have an extended orgasm, you’ll still have loads of pleasure! The great thing about ecstatic pleasure is that it cannot coexist with shame, stress, fear, anger, bitterness, rage, or exhaustion. Practicing ecstasy is practicing living outside all of those things, learning how to release them. It’s as good for you as vegetables, jogging, sleep, and breathing. acknowledgmentsGratitude, first of all, to all the women who’ve talked to me about their sex lives, whose stories are woven into the narratives of Camilla, Olivia, Merritt, and Laurie, and throughout the book. I hope I have done justice to your stories. Gratitude to the researchers, educators, and counselors who talked to me, read chunks of the book, told me I didn’t sound like a nut, told me I did sound like a nut, and/or nodded sympathetically as I apologized about the difference between writing science itself and writing about science for a general audience. In alphabetical order: Kent Berridge, Charles Carver, Kristen Chamberlin, Meredith Chivers, Cynthia Graham, Robin Milhausen, Caroline Pukall, and Kelly Suchinsky. Let the record show that any mistakes in the science are my own fault, despite precise and clear feedback from these good people. Gratitude to Ms. Erika Moen, who drew the genitals so beautifully. Gratitude to the beta readers, especially Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka, Patrick Kinsman, Ruth Cohen, Anna Cook, and Jan Morris. Gratitude to readers of my blog, who read early drafts of the book, commented on posts for four years, kept me intellectually and emotionally honest, and kept me questioning what I thought I knew, so that I could be a better writer. Gratitude to my students at Smith College, who asked questions I’d never considered (“What’s the evolutionary origin of the hymen?”) and pushed me to understand ever more deeply what I was teaching, so that I could be a better teacher. To all of you: Thank you.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  If you haven’t figured it out by now, Olivia—the marathon runner, the intense, driven, sensitive accelerator woman—is a perfectionist. So here’s what she said when she learned about the little monitor: “Well that explains… you know, my whole life.” Perfectionists set goals that are impossible—and if they somehow manage to achieve a goal, they assume that goal must be worthless and they set another, even more impossible goal. Which puts them in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. “And then I’m my own lion, like, all the time,” Olivia said. “And when you add the cultural brainwashing, that puts me in that out-of-control place with sex. “Jesus,” she added. Her experience moving at Patrick’s slower pace showed her the potential in slowing down and allowing more of herself to align with the goal of experiencing sexual pleasure—to take control of the little monitor, so that it didn’t take control of her. As an experiment one Saturday afternoon, Olivia tried meditating while she gave Patrick an erotic massage. She practiced keeping her mind quiet and focused on the present. Any time a stray thought entered her mind, she acknowledged it fleetingly and then let it go, returning her attention to the sensation of her partner’s skin under her hands. She found herself becoming aroused, and she noticed that her thoughts were increasingly turning toward orgasm, as her little internal monitor got impatient to reach her goal. But each time she felt pulled toward orgasm, she took a deep slow breath and returned her attention to Patrick. She didn’t hit the brakes, she just took her foot off the accelerator. After Patrick’s orgasm, they switched, and Olivia kept her attention tuned to the sensations of her body. As her arousal grew, she continued to breathe deeply and slowly, not allowing her abdominal muscles to tense too much. The result was an orgasm that lasted several minutes as her body shuddered and rolled, and Patrick stayed with her, holding and kissing her, fingers pressed against her vulva. It ended with joyful tears and a kind of bubbly chattiness quite unlike Olivia’s usual postorgasmic self. She felt open and raw and tender. She told me later, “It was like being way out in the center of the ocean, when I usually just surf on the shore. Bigger and slower… and scarier, too, in some ways. I was all the way open. I had to let go of all control. I had thought I was an erotic powerhouse because I could have a lot of orgasms and because I wanted sex often. But it turns out my greatest erotic power only emerged when I stopped pushing toward orgasm and just allowed pleasure to be still inside me.” Not every woman wants to experience this kind of radical vulnerability with her sexuality. Not every woman trusts her partner enough to allow herself to let go so thoroughly. Not every woman has a life that allows the time—an hour, generally, for most people—and relaxation necessary to get there.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Similarly Abulafia wrote that the Kabbalist would often “see” and “hear” the person of his spiritual director, who became “the mover from inside, who opens the closed doors within him.” He felt a new surge of power and an inner transformation that was so overwhelming that it seemed to issue from a divine source. A disciple of Abulafia gave another interpretation of the ecstasy: the mystic, he said, became his own Messiah. In ecstasy he was confronted with a vision of his own liberated and enlightened self: Know that the complete spirit of prophecy consists for the prophet in that he suddenly sees the shape of his self standing before him and he forgets his self and it is disengaged from him … and of this secret our teachers said [in the Talmud]: “Great is the strength of the prophets, who compare the form of Him who formed it” [that is, “who compare men to God”]. 58 Jewish mystics were always reluctant to claim union with God. Abulafia and his disciples would only say that by experiencing union with a spiritual director or by realizing a personal liberation the Kabbalist had been touched by God indirectly. There are obvious differences between medieval mysticism and modern psychotherapy, but both disciplines have evolved similar techniques to achieve healing and personal integration. In the West Christians were slower to develop a mystical tradition. They had fallen behind the monotheists in the Byzantine and Islamic empires and were perhaps not ready for this new development. During the fourteenth century, however, there was a veritable explosion of mystical religion, especially in Northern Europe. Germany in particular produced a flock of mystics: Meister Eckhart (1260–? 1327), Johannes Tauler (1300–61), Gertrude the Great (1256–1302) and Henry Suso (ca. 1295–1306). England also made a significant contribution to this Western development and produced four great mystics who quickly attracted a following on the Continent as well as in their own country: Richard Rolle of Hampole (1290–1349), the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing , Walter Hilton (d. 1346) and Dame Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–1416). Some of these mystics were more advanced than others. Richard Rolle, for example, seems to have gotten trapped in the cultivation of exotic sensations, and his spirituality was sometimes characterized by a certain egotism. But the greatest of them discovered for themselves many of the insights already achieved by the Greeks, Sufis and Kabbalists. Meister Eckhart, for example, who greatly influenced Tauler and Suso, was himself influenced by Denys the Areopagite and Maimonides.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He felt that he was in another world, would find himself shaking and trembling as though possessed by a force outside himself. But there was no anxiety. Luria insisted that before he began his spiritual exercises, the Kabbalist must achieve peace of mind. Happiness and joy were essential: there was to be no breast- beating or remorse, no guilt or anxiety about one’s performance. Vital insisted that the Shekinah cannot live in a place of sorrow and pain—an idea that we have seen to be rooted in the Talmud. Sadness springs from the forces of evil in the world, whereas happiness enables the Kabbalist to love God and cleave to him. There should be no anger or aggression in the Kabbalist’s heart for anybody whatsoever—even the goyim . Luria identified anger with idolatry, since an angry person is possessed by a “strange god.” It is easy to criticize Lurianic mysticism. As Gershom Scholem points out, the mystery of God En Sof, which was so strong in The Zohar , tends to get lost in the drama of tsimtsum , the Breaking of the Vessels and Tikkun . 6 In the next chapter, we shall see that it contributed to a disastrous and embarrassing episode in Jewish history. Yet Luria’s conception of God was able to help Jews to cultivate a spirit of joy and kindness, together with a positive view of humanity at a time when the guilt and anger of the Jews could have caused many to despair and to lose faith in life altogether. The Christians of Europe were not able to produce such a positive spirituality. They too had endured historical disasters that could not be assuaged by the philosophical religion of the scholastics. The Black Death of 1348, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the ecclesiastical scandals of the Avignon Captivity (1334–42) and the Great Schism (1378–1417) had thrown the impotence of the human condition into vivid relief and brought the Church into disrepute. Humanity seemed unable to extricate itself from its fearful predicament without God’s help. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, therefore, theologians like Duns Scotus of Oxford (1265–1308)—not to be confused with Duns Scotus Erigena—and the French theologian Jean de Gerson (1363–1429) both emphasized the sovereignty of God, who controlled human affairs as stringently as an absolute ruler. Men and women could contribute nothing to their salvation; good deeds were not meritorious in themselves but only because God had graciously decreed that they were good. But during these centuries, there was also a shift in emphasis. Gerson himself was a mystic, who believed that it was better to “hold primarily to the love of God without lofty enquiry” rather than to “seek through reasons based on the true faith, to understand the nature of God.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Emma Seppälä and Marissa King of Yale University note that “people who have a ‘best friend at work’ are not only more likely to be happier and healthier, they are also seven times as likely to be engaged in their job. What’s more, employees who report having friends at work have higher levels of productivity, retention, and job satisfaction than those who don’t.” Of course, friendships in the office can be tricky. As a note: Team members’ interpersonal relationships are typically none of our business as managers; that is, until team performance is impacted. When taken to extremes, for instance, cliquishness can create Survivor-like alliances and tribes that can cause more exclusion for some. Also, when boundaries are blurred between the professional and the personal, there’s an opportunity for feelings and group performance to be hurt. However, the fact that there is potential for entanglements is not an excuse for managers to avoid connecting employees with each other. Workers don’t necessarily have to go out for drinks or share intimate personal details about themselves, e.g., So that’s the story of my lower back tattoo. No, positive relationships are built on vulnerability, authenticity, and compassion—and those can happen within work hours, within healthy boundaries (such as establishing rules about avoiding office gossip and that everyone should be included and treated equally). Managers should also model those behaviors in their interactions with their team members, say Seppälä and King. So, should managers try to be friends with those they supervise? While they can be warm and caring, managers should not be too chummy with their employees. We could point (as a bad example) to the wayward wisdom of Michael Scott of The Office, who was so concerned with being his employees’ best friend that he couldn’t hold anyone accountable. “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy: both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me,” he said. Though entertaining, no one should ever attempt to emulate Scott’s behavior in the workplace, or anywhere else. We were once asked to coach a high-potential manager. The division director admitted he’d promoted the fellow to a supervisory position because, in addition to being competent in his finance role, he got along with everyone. “He was the guy you’d most want to go to a party with,” said the director. But once Mr. Life of the Office became the “boss,” he became Mr. Tough Guy. What friendships had existed became frayed. No one wanted to even have a casual conversation with him. It seemed like all he could talk about was deadlines and quotas, and his constant scowl seemed to show his team members they weren’t doing all they could.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Just three days before his wedding, Luther received a letter from his friend Spalatin, who was considering marriage himself. In the letter, Spalatin asked Luther what he thought of long engagements, and Luther’s typically witty response was “when you’re driving the piglet, you should hold the sack ready.” He also said, Don’t put off till tomorrow. By delay, Hannibal lost Rome. By delay, Esau forfeited his birthright. Christ said “You shall seek me and you shall not find.” Thus Scripture, experience, and all creation testify that the gifts of God must be taken on the wing.10 Luther Is Married, Aetatis 41Sixteenth-century marriages in Germany were typically two-stage affairs. There was first a small ceremony with a handful of witnesses and then a larger event with a church procession and guests from out of town. But the initial event was capped with the consummation of the marriage, so the marriage—actually called the Kopulation, which is etymologically related to the more anodyne word “couple”—was in fact consummated before the wedding. If the marriage was not consummated, the wedding would not happen. And if the marriage was consummated, the couple were as good as married before the wedding. This was the typical case, and Luther and Kathie were no exception. So on the evening of June 13—a Tuesday—his friend Johannes Bugenhagen, who was the Wittenberg parish pastor, conducted the ceremony in the Black Cloister. It was attended by Luther’s closest friend at that time, Justus Jonas, and by Lucas Cranach and his wife, Barbara, with whom Kathie had been living for some time. Another local friend, the jurist John Apel, was there too. He had also married a former nun and was chosen by the university as the official witness to the marriage.