It started as a violation too young to name. Medical trauma as a baby that ruptured the sacred, the holy place of me without consent. My body and nervous system exiled erotic before I had language for what was taken.

Culture exiled it for me too.

Intergenerational trauma.

Patriarchal narratives.

Domination of the earth.

All reasons my body exiled the erotic within.

I think Eros needs remembered and re-enter language as a household word, a word that informs erotic.

The last few years I’ve been coming into deeper relationship, maybe even kinship with eros. It started before I really knew what it was.

It started with recognizing the banishment of erotic.

This is where eros has been exiled to.

There’s actually a cultural narrowing that happened over time, where “erotic” became almost exclusively about sexual desire, often viewed with suspicion or shame. Some good reasons to exile its presence, particularly as one who has some strong Christian religious devotion in my ancestral lines. My body carries this her and his|story too.

I came to realize how exhausting it is for my nervous system to be constantly tamping down, managing, working hard to exile erotic.

Banishing the erotic is a violation of life itself.

Exiling eros, we exile cycles of creation, the fecund and beautiful energy that births new forms, the intimacy that binds us to beauty.

This is not only repression, but a sadistic severing of our life force, a culturally coercive way placing demands on eroticism and beauty, while simultaneously distracting our attention from intimacy and demanding a pace of survival.

This disembodies power, disembodies beauty, distancing us from eros.

A double bind scenario.

As I came to realize how exhausting, unauthentic, and unpleasurable it was to banish the erotic of me, I started holding curiosity for the etymology of this word. What’s the root of erotic that has so much stigma and shame around it, a presence that’s often kept underground or on the fringes within sexual practices and subcultures?

“Erotic” comes from the Ancient Greek word ἔρως (eros), meaning “love” or “desire.” Yet in today’s culture, erotic appears to encompass ‘sexual desire’ and eros is not a word used in day-to-day language, people often asking me what it means when I use it!

It breaks my heart we are so distant from relationship with eros. Erotic is beautiful - and only a drop in the pond of life.

Plato orients to eros as a philosophy, a system that includes mathematics and ethics, rather than being dissipated to sexuality, it’s actually an energy that can feed life. He saw it as a scaffold, a ladder of sorts that included more than the erotic, an essence that can transform consciousness.

1. Starts with physical attraction to a person

2. Evolves into appreciation for the beauty within that person

3. Becomes appreciation for beauty itself

4. Ultimately leads to understanding of truth and the divine

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Plato reminds us of what needs to be remembered – erotic is not where it ends, but where it begins, living in the first rung of the ladder – and eros keeps unfolding and dropping life into deeper connection with the world around you.

We are surrounded and touched by eros but so many of us are numb to it.

We might taste food and appreciate the colours, yet do we slow down to eat and be deeply fed by earths gifts?

We are touched by wind, water, skin, and do we really feel it?

We see beauty, but do we pause and let it penetrate and move us?

When eros is exiled and we are numbed and distracted from our presence, we exist but don’t truly live into this rich experience of being alive.

Eros is what supports us to remember soul, to be in deep relationship with beauty which could lead to living life more closely to truth.

Considering this – what if eros could be a lifesaving thread for reimagining these times?

I think a reclaiming of the erotic is needed too. Erotic tends to reside in sexual realms. It is known as a transformative force, kin to a sacred madness that opens a body, a heart, a soul, to the vulnerability and intimacy of divine love and creation – not a fleeting pleasure or love, but the river currents that run between all sentient beings.

Trees might know they are trees because of wind and breezes moving through their branches, swaying them side to side. It is through intimate relational contact and the touch of wind, they feel the presence of their branches and leaves.

River currents dancing with shadow and light, surface and depths, different songs for different places of constriction, love making with the stones of riverbed.

So much entanglement of eros.

Eros isn’t a thing in the world.

Eros IS the world becoming.

It’s not inside the system.

It IS the system.

It’s the connective tissue that bridges between beauty, the messenger between visible and invisible, the space between self and another, body and soul.

It’s the original source that binds us to this earthly life and the divine. It’s not a bridge but a space of relationship between where creation happens.

A river does not have eros, river is eros – water shaping stone, stone shaping river into its becoming toward ocean. Sun loves the world by drawing water vapour towards it, touching the sky to rain down and kiss the earth. Science explains this system and cycle, and eros is the system.

We are eros.

We are expressions of it, not vessels containing it. When the erotic is exiled, a dam is placed in the flowing river of your life’s expression and your becoming.

As my understanding of eros has grown, so my intimacy with the world has deepened. I’ve become more porous, and increased ability to be touch by life and devoured by beauty.

Light dancing through the trees can undo me now.

Listening to a creek feels like a creek flowing through and tickling my tissues.

A caring gesture from a stranger pull’s tears from me.

I’m not fragile or weak.

I’m alive.

I’m being in my animal body as a human. This is what happens when eros is not exiled, when the beauty of the world is allowed in, like…really in.

It’s like falling in love.

In January 2023, eros woke me at 3am, the hour of soul when the veil thins. I wrote without thinking, my eyes squinting sleep away, my pen moved without explanation or coherent understanding.

“Pour me over the edges of my longing into the dark quiet place of dreams, visions, shadows, and soul.

Feast on my love and lament, as I sink and melt into your eros, tumbling and tossing with matters of love making through the night.

Mount my dreams to entangle and weave this wild becoming, breathing and panting your sky and your fungi.

I surrender to your vision for my soul’s unique stitch in your fabric.

Romancing your love is like a deep winding, sensuous river flow that leaves me restless to hunt and be hunted by the poetry of this life, this gentle, shy, fierce mystery of Love.”

I didn’t really know what I was writing. I now look back and think it was a love letter from my psyche to eros, perhaps the myth of Eros and Psyche enacted through my body, soul falling in love with desire, desire extending an offering to soul to become.

Eros needs to be a household word again.

Not to start a trend or to be interesting, but to feed our lives. In the culture of modernity, soul is dying without it. We are exhausted without it, a slow death in the exile. Life becomes transactional without eros, bodies numb, shallow distraction and fragmented attention become the norm.

So many are drawn to rivers because they mirror so much life, so much of who we are. We long to know what river know. How to rage and rest, to leg go and constrict, to shape and be shaped.

Eros offers deep permission for your aliveness, the unique expression of your soul, the river of you to flow, renew, change shape, be loud and soft, to fall and empty in the ocean of things.

Eros is relationship with the intimacy of life and modernity is operating in opposition to intimacy. Eros is a place to quench the longing for presence, depth, and ultimately belonging.

And it’s here!

Eros is already here.

It’s been here all along in the bird song, the misting mornings, bellowing thunder, all longing to be touched by your beauty.