Making Love in 2020: the Year of Truth
By: Karen Willard Ribeiro
Tags: Societal Crises, Making Love, Truth, Karens

This post is my final contribution to a year-long series: 2020: The Year of Truth. In January, I listened to my inner voice as it laid out twelve monthly topics for the year and I have posted a blog each month accordingly. And still, in retrospect, I much prefer this “Year of Truth” way of describing 2020 to the more popular and oversimplified phrase, “#WorstYearEver”.

I received a holiday gift of a 2020 snowflake ornament made with various sizes of the word Fuck fanned out in a cursive, subtly disguised, font — fanned out like the banality that is so easy, crude, and both un-evolved and uninspired. The description that came with this ornament (pictured here) even speaks to the Karen phenomenon, which is the subject of my new book, Beyond Karen (email me at Beyond.Karen@outlook if you want details). I get the urges to seek affiliation by desecrating reality; I struggle with it too. But aren’t we humans capable of so much more?

As a writer whose Medium profile (prior to its current advertisement for my book) was simply, “Woman pursuing harmony,” it rankled my precious and divergent sensitivities to invest myself in offering up many thousands of words of embodied truth in exchange for a meager ten cent compensation. Definitely not even a penny for my thoughts.

Doing what (or whom!) one loves is the advice of so many who have “made it” in and through the world. But does one have to start at the bottom with every new expression of itself? Or is there a more elegant way of emerging — of composing and arranging the multidimensionality of a living potential — on purpose?

The topic I chose for this blog post back in January is “making love” and the nature of embodiment as a way of life. When most of us adults think of making love, we think of fucking. Even if we may be trying to be evolved and manifesting some expression of elegance in our lives, equating love with intercourse is very much a culturally programmed opinion to contend with. I contend that the best sexual lovemaking follows the cultivation of love awareness in as many ways as possible, whether moment by moment, as a daily practice, or as a lifelong ambition.

To love the breath, the water one drinks and bathes with, to feel devotion to the natural world as fiercely as we devote ourselves to our partners — — — that … feels … like the answer to our multiple complex societal crises.

Making love is the unique dance of listening to oneself and another as another listens to their self and you.

We know that a clear and succinct form of feedback one gets when making love is orgasm, hence the natural pursuits and attentions we give it. Imagine if we had that clear of a response with each conversation — there would be either no minor or catastrophic mistakes ever made, or an awful lot of faked “orgasms”!

There is such richness in the unknowing, in the exploration and frustration with the act of trying; and this effort to keep refining our actions, our approaches to dialogue, to behavior, to sentimentality, is what gives life its depth and meaning. If life feels meaningless, it is a signal to go exploring — to trust the void made by the awareness of not knowing something important and to trust the self, the body and mind to endure whatever frustration necessary while in pursuit of the desired answers, the subtle confirmation of hearing and being heard, of sensing and being sensed.

I’m not widely known as a writer. I have had many interesting and satisfying career paths (as others have many interesting and satisfying lovers) but the embodied truth of my inner writer has consistently given me the sharpest edge against which to explore the void and frustration. The challenge of building a platform to engage others in honest thought feels logical — follow the X Y and Z formula of marketing, etc.— and yet evasive and unsatisfying … until I return to love.

When love guides my life, my conversations, my writing, the giving is deeply intertwined with the receiving. I care less about the ten cents or whatever, and more about the listening and follow through action. The feedback I seek, the confirmation of being heard and seen, is faint like a whisper, like the communications which nature makes, evokes, in and with us. It can really be frustrating, like sexual arousal and a great buildup with no climax. But then again, such un-evolved and uninspired attachment to outcome or orgasm is crude and inelegant.

Would that we all could trust the magnificent universe to guide us in all ways. On this 25th day of December, the day of celebrating the birth of Christ, it may be a lovely endeavor, a making of love, to reflect on the questions embodied within. And then as a gift of love to the self, listen to what emerges. Even if the Truth is, “I don’t know … and it’s okay.”