Sensuality

An invitation to desire

The following is the ninth part of a 12 part series based on the book 12 Tiny Things: Simple Ways to Live a More Intentional Life. We’re focusing on the 12 themes outlined in the book: Space, Work, Spirituality, Food, Style, Home, Sensuality, Nature, Creativity, Communication, Learning, and Community. Each offering includes a new reflection or early draft or deleted scene from the book along with a worksheet and/or an audio component to help you delve more fully into the theme in your own life.

The theme we’ll touch on today is Sensuality, through a series of early writings that worked their way in and then back out again from that chapter in 12 Tiny Things. A sentence or two eventually got included in a chapter in Collisions of Earth and Sky about embodiment.

Morning means coffee in my house. I get up, feed the cat who is meowing incessantly, and turn on the drip. Sometimes I take a tiny sip of water to swallow a vitamin, but that’s it. Coffee is the very first part of my routine, and it has been for more than a decade. I don’t remember why I started drinking it. I wonder sometimes if I even like coffee.

Identifying what we really want can be hard. It is for me, anyway. Can you be bad at desire? Sometimes I think I am. l like to blend in, to be in the background, to help out on support staff. Expressing how I feel and what I want is not my default. I’m not wired to think about what my body craves. It feels easier to stick with the routine, even if it doesn’t always feel quite right.What does my body want? It wants anything that brings refreshment. It wants strength, and confidence. It wants passion, but it also wants to feel relaxed and supple. It wants to be safe, filled up with nourishment. It wants to be standing in front of the wood stove, warmth seeping deep into bones. It wants my husband’s hands at the small of my back. It wants to slip into ice cold water on a sun-drenched day high in the mountains. It wants the sensation that comes from a brush being run through my hair by my daughter. My body wants to exist in partnership with other bodies. It wants to be autonomous. It wants what it wants, and those wants shift. It doesn’t want to apologize for any of these things.

And as it turns out, my body wants water, not coffee, first thing in the morning. Room temperature, not ice cold. [Later in the day, it wants ice cold, with lemon, on the deck in the sun when it’s warm outside.] From a glass canning jar, running down my throat while watching the sun rise next to the cat, feeling my cells rehydrating as a new day begins.

As found scribbled in an art journal in autumn 2023:

What do you want? What would happen if you truthfully answered that question and acted in a way that brought you closer to embodying the answer? What if your answer feels farther away than is possible to reach? What if it doesn’t, and you got what you wanted? What if what you want keeps growing each time you reach it, and it gets so big that wanting threatens to take over everything else? What if that big desire keeps you moving in a way that fills you with the life that was really want you wanted all along?

So, folks, consider that question, especially when it comes to your body—what do you want? Here’s a tiny thing to try on—what do you really want to drink first thing?

The poem read above, called “A Recipe for One Kind of Pleasure” is from my 2024 poetry collection Just Wild Enough.

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P.S. I’ll be reading at Blank Verse on Thursday, April 17, 2025 at the Northtown Library in Blaine, MN with two other poets. It’s a reading series that supports diverse writers of all ages, levels, genres and performance styles including poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and spoken word. 6:30-8pm.