6/25/17

i'm thankful that when d and i were first sleeping together, she was mildly scandalized to realize that i slept naked. i'm thankful that i have slept naked since puberty and possibly before and if i am ever forced to sleep in underwear and/or socks find it very unpleasant and usually still sleep naked because comfort is more important to me than propriety. i'm thankful for the feeling of my bare bottom pressing into cool crisp fitted sheet. i'm thankful for my testicles, loose and lazy, hanging on a pocket of air. i'm thankful for whatever the opposite of compression is (release? but that feels like an act rather than a state). i'm thankful to wriggle my toes freely and to dig them into the sheet.

i'm thankful to walk around the house with no clothes on. i'm thankful that though our house has a lot of windows and we generally keep the blinds open because we like light, most of the time because of the placement of our house/plants/windows i don't think people can see me with my clothes off and i'm thankful that though i prefer that they don't see me, it also wouldn't be the end of the world if they saw me. i'm thankful that i was raised not to be ashamed of my nakedness. i'm thankful that i have always found that part of the adam and eve story fucked up (okay, actually, thankful that i find all the parts fucked up).

i'm thankful to love art that feels like nakedness and for the way that art reveals so many different kinds of nakedness, that every person naked is naked in the same way as every other person and yet is also naked in their own particular way. i'm thankful that makes me think of writing, how we all use this common pool of sounds and shapes and this is the thing that makes communication possible, but how for each of us, these abstract models are encoded into the mysterious, intricate structures of the brain and the body, which shape them as they shape us.

i'm thankful for moments when i touch a part of d's naked body and it is colder or warmer than i expect it to be. i'm thankful for how much more complex a naked body is than a photograph, how a photograph of a naked body could make you think that the skin of the curve of a hip would feel the same to touch as the top of a knee or the side of the base of the neck but how each of those locations is a different country of sensation and circulation.

i'm thankful for my favorite kind of mindfulness meditation, which involves closing your eyes and trying to focus as much as you can on the transient and ephemeral sensations of your body, on feeling what it feels like in a very specific place of you at a very specific time and trying to be aware of that as possible, to feel instead of think. i'm thankful for how ecstatic this simple thing of being in a body can feel if you work at it for a period of time, as i have done during various periods of my life. i'm thankful to scan my body for signals and for noise.

(note: i will be on vacation this week. there will still be some kind of note emailed to you every day, but they probably won't come at the normal times and may not come in the normal forms)