Your skin has many “functions.” There
are holes. Entrances and exits. There are tricks, e.g., eyes which
can be opened or shut. Tongues which play hide and seek. As a youth,
you experience that this skin grows, and that you expand, and as
you expand physically so you hear that you are growing “up.” In
mind and heart, as well.
The most shuddering discovery of
skin is when you learn its spiritually intimate erotic
linkage to sex. You learn that your genitals allow
you physical entrance into another, wherein you have an experience
like no other! You grasp that these male “outties” and
female “innies” are more than appendages
of physical sense. They are more than simple interior
probes. Yes, they probe the interior like no other part of the
skin, but they seem specially attuned to
mutual embrace. At the same time, you experience a vulnerability like
never before, as if the Other could skin you alive!
You sense that they see through you,
that “You’ve gotten under my skin!”
As Earthfolk know so well, when you make present
your precious intimacy with another and so touch preciousness and
so first spy the possibility of Belovedness, the Warrior's
Quest shadow also looms large. The potential for
abuse, physical, mental and spiritual is readily obvious. Like
Adam and Eve, you sense that your intimacy is so personal that
to bring it into public light is to feel shame.
Shame, here, is a good sense. Yes, making present your shadow is
good and healthy. You don’t want to be controlled by it,
so you respect it. Humorously, so many men—when they experience
the “petit mort” for the first time—speak
of feeling like a babe in the arms of their lover. For the Warrior's
Quester, such a feeling of tenderness and of being back in the
womb is, itself, an evil thought and temptation. They deny these
tendernesses and cover their feelings with acts of Domination,
that is, of sexual abuse, verbally and physically.
Continue—Skin
