It’s my first morning waking up in Dehradun. I’m visiting my dad’s family home for a week, enjoying the company of 4 generations of relatives, amazing food, and sitting in the sun for hours drinking chai. I was proud of myself waking up at 5am, a solid execution of my kicking-jet-lags-ass plan to keep myself busy and stay up until 8pm the night before — at which point I basically fell into the bed and passed out. I had feared that despite my best efforts, I would still wake up at 3am and need a mid-day nap, elongating my jet lag general haze.
Instead I enjoyed the quiet of the morning as the sky lightened. I went to the balcony and heard the morning azaan playing. Warm recognition rose in my body, a sign of universality, faith, and community. Being in a city with azaan played over loud speaker always reminds me how small my world is in Minneapolis, in which the largest religion in the world barely makes a splash on the social landscape and Islamophobia and white Christian supremacy are part of the fabric.
Here, these exist of course (shout out to colonization and centuries of empires fighting over this land!), but they feel like layers of the culture, not the foundation. I’m reminded again how much of the world I haven’t seen — and the inherent yearning to explore.
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“What is satisfaction?” my niece T asked. She’s reading an American chapter book and periodically looks up to get the explanation of a word or idea that she doesn’t understand.
What is satisfaction? How do I explain to her that this is the central question of my life in the period that she’s met me? That whenever I have time to think and be and feel into myself, I am left wondering why I don’t experience more satisfaction? Or what would bring it to me?
Sometimes I grapple with whether I should even be searching for satisfaction? Is it terribly self centered to do so? I am reminded that I am led by Audre Lorde to search wildly within myself and in my environment for closeness to the erotic. That connection with the erotic is connection to a deep revolutionary pleasure and power within.
In her incredible essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Audre says, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
I search for this, how I may feel satisfaction, how I may notice it when it comes and understand it’s power. Audre describes satisfaction from deep love, intimacy, sunlight on her back, the feeling after finishing a project. I think about this often, how to cultivate satisfaction. I think about how I often feel at the end of a workout, after walking the dog park with a friend, when I wake up without an alarm, cleaning my whole house.
But I also think about how much difficulty I have setting up the circumstances for those things in my life. I feel resistance to the activities that bring me this pleasure and often opt for numbness, reflecting how I have been conditioned by a capitalistic environment that stretches me out and deadens my senses to keep me working for it’s perpetuation.
But I also recognize that part of this is releasing my wild — as Audre says “the chaos of our strongest feelings”. Lately I’ve come to terms with how much I fear this chaos. I’m learning to see if I can stay with the hard and wild parts of myself but that’s TBD.
I realize I can’t explain all of this to my niece and her parents would probably not appreciate me bringing in rhetoric about the erotic, often mistaken for the pornographic, and certainly too complex for a 9 year old to be able to discern. I try my best to give her an example that suits her and explain in few sentences. She still looks pretty confused when she turns back to her book. I feel confused still too.
