Thursday, June 23, 2005

Insight: A Holy Presence

If you're visiting this blog with a hard dick looking to be entertained by some good dirty talk, sorry; today's not the day. It is 5:00 AM as I begin this essay, a full two hours before my alarm is supposed to wake me to coincide with the time when Dee typically gets out of the shower on a workday. I like starting a day by seeing my wife nude and by being there during the ritual during which she selects her outfit for the day. Though at times I crave solitude, most of the time I want to be with Dee. It is my place - she is my shrine - my Garden of Eden where all is right and good in my being with her. Though the tempests of daily life would seek at times to beset my calm, she is my rock - my fortress - my anchor. She is the focus of the writings I'm compiling here; she is the verb in the sentences which define my life.

I have put off writing this particular piece for well over a year now, but the coalescence of thought bombarding me when I got up to use the bathroom kept me awake and led me here to the computer when I finally threw in the towel on trying to doze again, for I decided yesterday that today I would begin this treatise. My friend Len pricked my conscience in his most recent letter to me, telling me that I disappointed him when I balked at his urging to write this particular piece. I put off starting this for various reasons - not knowing if I'm entirely off the mark in what I feel - not really believing that I might do it justice. I have reached the point, though, where I am compelled to try, at least, to defend a premise which I proposed to Len, and to others in general in some of my writings - a premise which seems absurd in that it patently contradicts Judeao-Christian morality yet seems so totally self evident to me.

I have made the claim which I will seek to defend here that there is an ineffable element of the spiritual present when I share Dee with another man, and not in a small degree. At times while witnessing the love making between Dee and a lover I feel that I am in the presence of something profoundly holy - that I am on sacred ground as much as I've ever been when I've set foot into a church. I have no outline to follow here, rather many random thoughts in this regard swirling about me which I will seek to tame in the paragraphs which follow. Grab a cup of coffee or a cold drink and hold onto your hat because I'm not sure where we're going to end up in the paragraphs which follow.

To begin with, I need to explain to you, dear reader, why sharing Dee sexually with others does not constitute adultery regardless of whether or not her lovers happen to be married themselves. If you are a fundamental semanticist, read no further because the rest of this essay will be lost on you should you seek to pounce on me with dictionary in hand. I seek not to argue with what you'll find printed, but perhaps to challenge the very definition you would seek to hold sacrosanct.

Marriage vows are made, each to the other, by the parties to the union in the presence of heaven, but not to heaven itself. For the record, I do hold wedding vows to be sacred - holy in their own right insofar as they are meant with utter sincerity to bind two individual lives into one mind and one heart. The day to day living of life will be done from that day forward as if husband and wife were one being. As the importance of any issue they face increases, so the distinction of individuality between the marriage partners becomes increasingly tenuous and nebulous. In professing wedding vows, in essence, each party promises to be half of a new entity. This is the heart and soul of marriage as I understood it all of my life; it is how I intended my own marriage to be from the very day on which I asked Dee to be my wife.

When Dee makes love with a man other than myself (or I to another woman) there is no breaking of vows between us because each has the other's full assent to extend what are considered the usual sexual rights within a marriage to others. Walking among us are many wonderful persons who are former nuns and priests who made vows to God Himself and then "took them back" when it became evident that the ordained or consecrated life wasn't for them. Nobody except perhaps the most self righteous Catholic passes judgment on them, not even the Church itself. If vows such as those can be forfeited permanently without incurring sin, then marriage vows may be suspended in part by mutual consent. Therefore, my claim that extramarital sex for us has a positive, spiritual, holy element cannot be dismissed with a charge of its being adulterous because Dee and I are not breaking our vows to each other, we are merely suspending the usual sexual exclusivity that we enjoy to include others.

What then of adultery in terms of Dee being with a married man? I found this definition of adultery at dictionary.com and I rather like it: extramarital sex that willfully and maliciously interferes with marriage relations. Neither Dee nor I approach a bed with a married person with any degree of malice nor willful intent to disrupt his or her marriage. On the contrary, we seek to give to the other party, usually another man with Dee, an important part of life that his wife can't or won't give to him on her own - namely the sort of sex that lifts the spirit and which transcends the base physical sensations. We do not judge other wives; we lived exactly the sort of marriage ourselves for sixteen years where sex was a source of trouble rather than of joy. In retrospect, if I'd had a lover I might have been a better husband because the strain that our lousy sex life had on our marriage wouldn't have been there. Sex is a drive built into us and no person should be expected to do without it because of whatever issues prevent a partner from engaging in it lovingly; there is a rift in the natural order when sex within a marriage is broken. Withholding sex from one's marriage partner, whether willfully or otherwise, is more of a disruptive breaking of vows than having a lover if one remains committed to the essence of his marriage - the sharing of two lives as one as completely as can be done without the sexual element.

I have till now sought to explain away the possible charge of adultery in order that I might continue with my thesis that Dee's extramarital sexual experiences put me in the presence of something spiritually uplifting. If I have not done so to your satisfaction, depart, dear reader; I do not seek nor welcome rebuttal for this is my blog and I can write what I will. I have neither the stomach nor the stamina at this point in my life to enter into philosophical debate; I have become as my parents have been for quite some time - set in my ways of thinking and not open to argument, (i.e. pig headed).

The absolute best sex I have ever enjoyed in my life was the sex I had with Dee when we were seeking to conceive our children. There is no way in words that I might convey to you how much our coupling "meant to me" at those precise times when Dee and I came together to create new life. Sex is about life. The Church has been partly right there all along because one has to look no further than the basic facts of physiology to determine what our fun parts were designed for, though I dispute totally Holy Mother Church's claim that every sexual act must be open to the possible conception of new life. All but the hardest core atheist must admit the presence of the miraculous in the joining of a simple, single sperm with an ovum to create a wholly new being. And what better a way in order to make that new life - that precious new person - than in the context of tenderness and affection - ideally in a setting of love? Physically what we do is no different than what is done elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but no wildebeest has come from the rut to write a symphony, to build a palace to his love, to watch a sunset in tears of joy.

Though it would have been my greatest nightmare if I had gotten my sister's best friend pregnant during the years from junior high though high school when we experimented with sex together, I was always conscious, almost in a worshipful way of her potential fertility. I looked at her body reverently at times, sometimes caressing her belly and imagining her pregnant. Even then when conception would have been disastrous the obvious connection between sex and the beauty of new life compelled me to acknowledge it. How fitting that she and I gave to each other our virginity on Easter Sunday of 1976 - a day which celebrates life in a most holy way.

To say that Dee looked spectacular when she was pregnant would be an understatement, yet I have no way to communicate adequately what I felt when I looked at and touched her swollen, stretch-marked belly as our children bloomed within her. Awe, in the truest sense of the word, is a poor summarization, so profoundly was I moved by the sight of her, and I will regret till my dying day that I didn't think to snap any Polaroids of her then. I still kiss and nuzzle her belly during our foreplay, ever mindful of the beautiful lives we created and which Dee nurtured in her body for their first nine months - fully conscious of the miracle by which they came into being - a miracle in which we expressed our love for each other in utter profundity with our bodies joined together as a tangible witness of the depth of emotion in which we sought to become parents.

Dee's tubes have been tied for three years now; indeed, if not for that I don't think we'd ever have considered sharing her. Yet, in spite of that I am humbly awed when another man's cock is inside her body, for I am witnessing the very act whereby every one of us came into existence in the miracle of conception. I will not argue, but admit the obvious imprudence of inviting Dee's lovers to make love to her bareback and to ejaculate into her, but both she and I are of one mind in wanting it that way. To me, the passing of her lover's semen into Dee is perhaps the most profound of all the moments they will share in their hours together on a bed. Her welcoming acceptance of her lover's potentially life giving fluid into her body elevates their sexual union to one which resembles our own "marriage act" most completely, particularly when Dee is with someone with whom both she and I share a great affection.

To summarize, then, this my middle section about the inexorable connection of sex with the capacity of the human to create life in an emotional as well as a physical coming together, I find great joy in watching Dee make love with another man because by its very nature, the act to its inevitable completion whereby her lover sprays his semen into her is the very same act by which Dee and I cooperated in the creation of new life. Being on the outside and not serving as a participant myself allows me to study the beauty of it all without the distraction of my own physical pleasure taking away from the cerebral and emotional moment. There before me, the very body in all of it's nude splendor with which I became a father - his cock gliding along the length of her vagina with the same urgency as I did myself to ensure that I would live on past my own mortal demise in the offspring of our union. His cock feeling that same uprising of deep pleasure that mine did, then gushing inside her in a moment of utterly indescribable bliss. My gaze is riveted and I forget to breathe when Dee's lover is ejaculating inside her. It is a moment like no other and I confront that which is deeply profound - what I call spiritual and holy when my wife is receiving another man's sperm. At times Dee takes her lover's semen into her mouth or into her ass rather than into her vagina, and although those acts are not the "live giving" act of vaginal intercourse I am no less moved in witnessing the affection with which Dee gives her lover the ultimate pleasure of ejaculating into her.

Finally, and I tread lightly here lest my own insecurities come to the surface, something needs to be said about the often hotly debated necessary connection between sex and love. My sister's friend, of whom I wrote earlier, was the only girl other than Dee with whom I'd had any significant sexual experiences, and for much of my adult life I'd felt guilt and shame in acknowledging to myself that I used her selfishly beyond the time when I had any true feelings of affection toward her. It was only after Dee had written the beautifully worded explanation of her relationship to the married man who claimed her virginity that I saw my experiences with "M" in a light in which I was able to forgive myself for the sexual relationship I enjoyed with her, but the full explanation of that won't be presented here. Suffice it to say that I learned somewhat late in life - perhaps not until these past three years during which I've been sharing Dee - that there can be and there is good sex without love, but that the very best kind of sex includes both.

I knew from the outset that Dee couldn't invite another man to share a bed with her if she didn't feel something emotional for him. My fear of just how much emotion there might be was the only thing that stood in the way of my total willingness to take the fantasy beyond the talk stage and into the blatant reality from which there could never be a total turning back if I found it to be more than I could handle. I am, basically, a jealous type of person and to share the one part of my life most precious to me for the sake of a sexual thrill seemed ludicrous even to consider, but the pull of the fantasy was huge and when I made it into Dee's fantasy as well, it came time to put up or shut up. Thus it was with a monstrously large leap of faith that I wrote to Don and invited him to present himself to Dee as a possible lover. I knew he valued his marriage though the sexual part was less than great, as my own had been for many years, and if Dee fell head over heels for him I believed I could count on him to be my safety net and keep things in their proper perspective. That first night, when they made love so beautifully that I first felt the sense of sacredness about which I write this treatise taught me more about sex, and life, and love than I thought there was to be known.

I use often in my writings about Dee's love making with Don and Mike words like "emotion," and "affection," in describing their coupling. I've never used before, but will now, the word love, because it's something that I've come to feel for both of the guys as well. I have sucked both of their cocks and I admit that when I'm doing it it's as much to express to them my feelings of deep friendship as to enjoy it in itself. Thus I understand that Dee loves each of them to a degree that doesn't in any way threaten the love she has for me, and that's precisely what takes on a life of its own when I watch her with them to become the intangible presence of sacrosanctity that I can feel deeply in a simple motel room as much as in any church with a vaulted ceiling.

Perhaps I didn't need to write as much as I did. Maybe it all comes down to this. That it's the love that Dee expresses in her sexual acts with her lovers that awes me, humbles me, grips me in its presence. I am watching in those moments the most profound kind of sharing of love that exists only when two bodies are joined as one completely - when lips and hearts are as tightly joined as penis and vagina in an outpouring of emotion, of joy, of peace, of deep satisfaction, of losing one's self in the personhood of another. And just maybe the fact that we go against the grain of standard morality makes it more profound because I am witnessing a powerful sort of love and sex that most persons would say has no right to exist without the "magic" of vows and rights and lit candles and such. It does exist, and I am privy to it - a unique holiness, sacredness, spirituality that most will never know. Either that, or I have sealed my own damnation and sought to justify it. But, it feels like love. Too much so for something as sacred as love itself to mislead me. Though the devil may quote scripture to serve his own ends I can only hope that he has not been allowed to bastardize love itself or I am doomed.

There is a smaller part of all this that deserves at least mention and that is the restorative nature of sex on the human spirit. Anyone who's ended a lousy day by having good sex knows its power to raise the wounded or damaged, the worried or anxious, the troubled or disheartened spirit to a place where it can cling to hope and look forward to another day. Making love is like playing a trump card when the aggravations of daily life sap one's energy and make one look at life with less than a healthy optimism. It puts zest back into the soul. Again, the Church er'rs in demanding that sex be relegated totally to the realm of reproduction while ignoring how it refreshes the downtrodden spirit and raises its sight to what is good and holy by its redemptive nature.

To conclude: I feel a nearly tangible spiritual presence in a room when Dee makes love with somebody with whom she shares her love as well as her body. The intensity comes in part from witnessing an act that by its very nature is a celebration of life itself in that it is the physical and ideally also the deeply emotional and loving act by which we all came into being. Making love in its truest sense is the physical expression of an inner love which seeks to manifest its depth in the closest way possible; seeing Dee truly making love with a partner for whom she feels love and expresses it in their intimacy is to approach the burning bush. To see her, her lover, and myself come away from such an evening of loving intimacy refreshed in spirit and glowing on the inside is to have, for at least a fleeting little while, everything that I have always wanted to have - a taste of heaven itself where God's in His heaven and all's right with the world.

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