Languid.
Languor.
Languorous.
Languorously.
Her limbs lazed languidly over the lounge. Despite the ordinariness of the setting and the conversation she made an impression that lasted. Somehow it was as though the very set of her body communicated with the inanimate in the most intimate way. Flirting with the furniture, she had been told. It is as though you are flirting with the furniture.
Have I said this? I feel like I have said this. I must have - every pore of me is oozing it. I feel so connected to my physical self. I can’t remember the last time I felt so ‘in’ my body. So present in this vessel of sensual experience. Everything is titillating. Even the warm wet island breeze is salacious in her gentle brushing against my skin, flicking my hair coquettishly, and the turquoise shallows seduce my gaze.
Are not all our experiences primarily sensual? That is; the experience of every moment arrives to us via the medium of one of our senses.
[Britannica Dictionary: Senses- the five natural powers, touch taste sight smell and hearing, through which you receive information about the world around you.]
Can it be any other way? There are no other experiential channels.
It only in the re-living of a moment in our mind that the experience is then removed of the original medium of expression and is intellectualised. Where I use ‘intellectualised’ to mean processed through the medium of our brains. Our brains are most interested in telling and retelling the story in a way that places ourselves at the centre of it all and controls the narrative. Humans are a unique animal.
It seems quite a coincidence that my personal and intimate revelations yesterday have produced the kind of body-feeling that I am immersed in today. I am feeling more. I have left my jandals somewhere, and my feet feel grounded in the grainy earth beneath my feet. There is music in my soul, whether or not there is music on the breeze. There is a part of me dancing with every passing moment. The sun is wafting on the warm currents of air, flooding my body with warmth even as I sit here in the shade. The wind is sticky with salty moisture. This strange and somewhat alien "completeness" that I have feels remarkably like what I imagined nirvana might feel like. I am writing, trying desperately to capture this feeling, as though I can stuff it in my journals to keep and bring it out to flood me, renewed at any given moment.
I will attempt a feeble - words can only convey a feeble - description of this perfect piece of time/space. I feel completely, sensuously full in every moment. Nothing more is needed for me to be completely happy. I sit in joy. It cusions my heart and reverberates through the cavity in my chest, pushing against my ribs and breast, it fills the air around me, emanating from me. How can it not be completely visible to all those who see me?
This completeness is the holy grail I have been pursuing for years now. I just need to be free of 60 hours a week work to feel it, I just need to lose my baby weight to be connected again with my body, I just need to get more sleep and I'll feel it effortlessly, I just need to repair this injury, I just need this post-covid fatigue to pass.....I just....I just.....and I never quite.....just can't reach.....just can't quite.....grasp it.
But here it is.
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I had kava last night. I got as close as I’d ever like to falling off the kava fun-cliff, which looks a little bit like beginning to feel a ‘greenness’ wash over your senses and the desire just to be in a quiet space to make the overstimulation of the senses settle until you feel that you manage the volume of sensory input.
I think it's a sport for the village lads now and I am a toy. There is always one of them dragging me into the circle of kava communion.
I am a willing victim.
They nod at the executor of their post-duty ritual who then scoops up a half coconut shell passing one to me and a second to whoever is teasing me. Full tide full tide they laugh as they give me a filled cup - not the token taste that most of the tourists are offered. They raise the bowl to the level of their eyes and nod at me, ensuring I am mirroring with my own coconut, Bula Bella! Eyes smiling, mischief on their minds, limbs becoming languorous. Kava has the effect of making me ridiculously happy. After three or four I am smiling, and suddenly finding lots of reasons to laugh from my belly. Pete and Kat*** joined me last night and we all laughed from our bellies. The local lads smiled and enjoyed our reactions along with us. Languid limbs and lively tongues. It is not like alcohol. You maintain total mental and physical control. I felt safe. Affected yes, but safe, alert and completely absorbed in the joy of each passing moment.
I have bonded with Kat. She is a fifty-something lady whose third marriage has ended and she is travelling alone seeking, I suspect, a self acceptance that has always eluded her. We talk open and frankly about topics that only strangers really can, Loosely and without weight, safe in the knowledge that after this day or two together we will never see each other again. She talks like she regrets not figuring things out sooner, like body confidence and self acceptance, like it's too late for her, and I ask her if she would rather figure it out in a further 10 years from now, or when she’s on her deathbed? Is it ever too late? Or is it always just in time? Your body is as young today as it is ever going to be again. I am rapidly closing in on forty and I was doing headstands against my bure this morning and then danced like a crazy thing in the coconut grove. Is this appropriate? Who cares. I love it, and I will still love it when I’m fifty, and if, by society's standards it's not appropriate for a nearly forty year old married woman to be wildly jumping grinding grooving spinning and being completely lost in terrible pop music by herself on a tropical island then it sure as hell is going to be even less appropriate at fifty or sixty - so I’d better get as much of it in as possible right now before I become even more of a scandal!
I will be dancing wildly as long as my hips have movement left in them to thrust. If I ever stop dancing you will know something is very wrong in my life. Or I am dead.
Speaking of appropriate (or inappropriate) behaviour.....Lagi and Kini return to the island today. I had given up hope and let go of seeing these beautiful men again, accepting that our paths had diverged before we’d even walked mile together. I was learning a tribal dance with shawn when I saw Kini suddenly appear on the deck. I was filled with joy and my legs were acting before my brain had a chance to second guess the appropriateness of my actions as I ran and jumped into Kini’s arms, his embrace meeting the warmth of mine, a smile as wide as the sky. The warmth I feel takes me by surprise. Lagi came around the corner and I leap into his arms and he gathers me up in warm embrace. His height and size easily lifting me off the ground body to body. There's no mistaking this emotion. This one is desire.
I need a cold shower.
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Shawn allows those of us who rehearsed the tribal dance to join the showcase this evening. The island dancers, the ladies, take us skinny white women backstage to attire us. Oh my, the beautiful voluptuous curves of the Fijian ladies leave me feeling all pokey and angled and insipidly pale. They bind our breasts into tubes of fabric in the absence of coconuts for modesty, and wrap our hips in traditional fabrics. Grass hats and flowers adorn our hair. Alongside the islanders we perform a traditional dance about being abroad on a traditional voyaging canoe. We search horizons for land, we fish for our meals and we celebrate our safe arrival onto new shores. It is so much fun to be included in the performance!
Gratitudes;
- For this incredible feeling of deeply sinking into my body. For being almost overwhelmed by the sensory inputs gifted by the unique coupling of this island and my mind-state. So filled with the present that my mind feels startlingly empty and I desire to do nothing. Not move, not write, not think, my mind is swaying languidly to the music but I’m pretty sure my body is just lying here on the cushion awash with sensation, completely sober but drunk on aliveness.
- That Taylor Swift dropped her latest album just days before I came to Fiji and that her lyrics are as intimate and poetic as ever. Her stories come to life in my body and my whole soul moves with recognition of common experiences.
- The hot wind that is skimming across the reef and lagoon and caressing my skin, bare in places, senses and sensations piquing.
***some names changed for privacy