me and Aphrodite, part 1
By Maewyn | October 9, 2011
So the line that kicked me into gear here was from Deborah Lipp’s most recent blog post about her cats and the strong relationship she has with them; she said that one “gave love like a Priestess of Ishtar.”
(I am sure I heard that line in a different way than she meant it, and I’m taking my thoughts off in another direction, but I did want to acknowledge the source.)
The first piece of background is that I am coming to claim the label of “prude” as an accurate one for me. I haven’t had many sexual partners, I’m long married, I generally don’t want to see or hear about sex except from my husband, and not any time is the right time. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture. Like I said earlier, not the kind of person you’d think of when you hear Aphrodite, right? But Ishtar falls along those lines. That’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about Deborah Lipp saying that her cat gave love like a Priestess of Ishtar — she can’t have been talking about anything sexual.
So for the rest of the day, and the day after that, I thought about connections with Aphrodite that weren’t sexual. Some of it was the “You like roses? I like roses! You like doves? I like doves!” kind of thing, true. But it was other things, like the sensual pleasure I take in feeling fabrics against my skin: soft flannel pajama bottoms, silky tops, scratchy wool, smooth cotton. The cooking I’ve been doing, concentrating on flavors and textures and combinations, experimenting, taking risks as well as connecting to comforts, experiencing the taste and sensation of the food. A reference to Her as the mother of all living things, in the beginning of my own mothering; the power of returning to sex to bring me back to myself, reminding me that I am more than a mother. The work that I did a couple years ago on dance and movement and embodiment, moving my body and being in it and reinforcing the mind/body connection, after a childhood and young adulthood of being discouraged from thinking very much at all about my body.
So what might a priestess of Aphrodite do that isn’t sexual? I talk about my cooking and what those flavors taste like, how the food feels in my hands and my mouth, inspiring other people to try this or that (or just that spark of desire, that ohh, I gotta have some of that). I talked about that process of embodiment as I went through it, and I try to stay conscious of my posture and my walk and move confidently — a daring thing for a fat person like me to do. At home, Hubs and I have a high-touch relationship, meaning that we check in with each other through a lot of touching shoulders, hands, feet, lips, whatever’s closest. We hug and snuggle a lot. And we practice attachment parenting with our daughter, in part because I grew up in a family that was very low-touch and I much prefer to create a family environment where casual touch is okay, and in part because I think it’s best for her to be held and snuggled a lot and picked up and soothed when something is wrong, not left to cry. We’re a bunch of breastfeeding, co-sleeping, babywearing hippies like that.
A complicating factor is that I also think of myself as selfish, not particularly giving, and not particularly observant of other people’s needs. (This is changing a little with my experience of motherhood and with just being in the world, thinking back on situations and going “Oh, this person said/did X because they needed Z, they were in this situation, and X is a logical reaction to that,” then looking for those signs next time.) I don’t have a lot of influence beyond my own wee family and my close friends. And I admit that I haven’t studied up on Aphrodite so I’m sure I’m missing big whacks of information about the way She was historically worshiped and thought of, and someone will likely be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am about something.
[ETA: See the results in Part 2.]
This isn’t the end of the story, though. This is another area where I have puzzle pieces and no box lid, bits of beginning but no end point in sight. In a future post I want to describe one more puzzle piece: how the statue currently in my kitchen came to be in my keeping.
