Chapter 20: Lover Earth (and a Well-Placed Dick Joke)

These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last. Thank you so much for reading. After this chapter, there will be a small monthly fee to continue having full access. The next chapters get even more personal and intimate. But what’s also true is that some of my ex’s friends are apparently devouring my content just to share the details of it with him. And while I understand that gossip can be delicious—and that’s their prerogative—they should absolutely have to pay me for that pleasure. ;) Enjoy…. In Charles Eisenstein’s essay, Rituals for Lover Earth, he shares a vision of our relationship with the Earth as maturing from that of mother to lover. “No longer do we treat earth as a mother from whom we are entitled to take and take without thought for how much she is capable of giving. Such a relationship is proper for a child. I want my own children to feel free to receive — it is up to me to determine how much I am able to give. But the relationship to a lover is different: to a lover we desire to give as well as to receive, and we desire to create together, each offering our gifts toward a purpose transcending each of us, so that our union becomes greater than the sum of our individuality.” I wish I could tell you that once I felt an embodied sense of the Divine Mother, I immediately had an embodied, Earthy life. A fast change like that can often happen with Fire energy or Wood energy, or Air energy in astrology speak, which can hit us fast and elicit immediate change. But Earth energy is slow and steady. The spirit of the Earth, the Yi, is about daily, intentional practice. Ritual. Earth energy is about our intentionality, and our day in, day out practices that are the embodied expression of our intention. I think of the farmer, tending to the Earth daily. Tilling the soil, planting seeds of intention, letting them gestate, seeing what arises, what blooms. Letting what blooms wither and die, shedding their seeds. And then starting again. In being with our intention, we create the life that we want to see. In being with our daily practice, we build the New Earth. “Yi gives us the power not only to sing the music of our spirits but to persist in singing, to apply ourselves to singing, until the vibrations of our heart songs have crystallized into material form.” — Lorie Dechar, Five Spirits Having strong earth energy allows us to create, “to sing the music of our spirits” so freely and intentionally that we create our “heart songs” in material form; in other words, Yi, earth energy, is what lets us plant the seeds of our heart and tend to them, till them, water them, allow them space to grow. Earth energy is what makes us fertile beings — the ones who turn intention into form. The Earth Mother meditation and awareness was just the beginning of this new type of relationship with myself, my body. I spent the years following just doing my best in loving myself, nurturing myself, letting myself have feelings, exploring how to be with myself, tending to my body, tending to my humanness. And from there, really looking at how I showed up in relationships. I began to see that tending the soil of my own being wasn’t always serene — sometimes it looked like sitting with an icky feeling until it softened into something fertile. Even this was Earth work: the practice of staying with what is, of composting what felt wrong until it revealed its richness. Shame, I discovered, was one of the richest materials to compost. The first time I got to sit with it was the time I made a dick joke around a group of friends and they told me that it wasn’t appropriate for the situation. I can chuckle at it now, but at the time, which was, granted, just a day before my period was due, I burst into tears and felt the burning hot flush of deep deep shame. I was premenstrual, I had felt a bit disconnected from my body, and awkward and uncomfortable, despite being with a group of close friends. I wanted to just be curled up in bed with a good book, but I trekked out in the cold - it was still COVID time so we were meeting outside in the winter, which felt cold and uncomfortable. Sometimes when I’m uncomfortable and feel awkward, I release my discomfort by making dick jokes. It happens. Am I proud of it? Honestly, sometimes I am. Sometimes a good dick joke is exactly what is needed to diffuse an uncomfortable situation. But more often than not, the dick joke is not necessary. I told my friends, through tears, how ashamed I felt. They told me that they loved me, even when I make inappropriate dick jokes. I sat with the shame for days, with feeling that I should have just stayed home. I felt like I’d abandoned myself by going out when I didn’t want to, and then, not behaving “right,” this embarrassment felt like punishment. That somehow if I always honor my inner knowing, I’d avoid discomfort, and that this happened was a sign that I’d failed. But that didn’t seem right either. To have to never be out of my comfort zone? To never be awkward and uncomfortable? To never do a “wrong” thing? Could I do a wrong thing and not have that make the entirety of me wrong? Could I do a wrong thing and still deserve love? I was reminded of being at the grocery store with my grandma, and her picking up an amply large cucumber or something, winking at me and saying “Konnah Hura,” which I know meant something else but I always heard it as Yiddish for “big dick.” And despite having spent the past few days avowing to never tell another dick joke, I felt a warm swell of love for Nana, for her bawdy sense of humor and the cackle she made with every Konnah Hura, and I decided that I wanted to be a woman who could, upon reading the crowd a bit better perhaps, tell a really good dick joke. And that maybe I wanted to hang out with more people who could chuckle at a well-placed dick joke. Letting myself feel the shame and be seen in the shame and continuing to love myself through the shame had alchemized it, let me see another part of myself and my lineage that I actually liked and didn’t want to shut down, and actually pointed me towards a desire I had for myself… light-hearted and playful community. I had spent the few years prior to that being with my feelings and comforting myself through feelings, but that was one of the first times that I was present with specifically shame around people. These people are still some of my dearest friends, and we all occasionally make a dirty joke, and I sometimes still wonder why that particular one was so off-putting. But this is how it goes… the daily, continual practice of being with it, of letting even a silly dick joke create magic. It’s shame alchemy, and it’s a powerful healer — Earth work in its purest form, composting the parts of ourselves we’d rather throw away and discovering they become the richest soil. It’s the same energy that makes love real — not the idea of perfection, but the willingness to stay. To stay with the Earth. To stay with each other. To stay with myself, even when it’s messy. Upcoming: Chapter 21: Longing I started to feel that my longing itself was holy. I could let my longing be my medicine. It wasn’t about satisfying my longing or getting what I wanted. The longing itself was the delicious thing. My longing was my passion, my life force, moving through me, letting itself be known. Have you ever had a “well-placed dick joke” moment — something awkward or human that ended up teaching you something sacred?