I wake with the taste of honey in my mouth and on my lips, on my skin, too, and I remember Oshun. I touch my skin– savoring– and understand I am beautiful as God made me, and Divine. The feeling itself is Divine, inexplicable and indescribably, because who can truly put into words the sensation of flesh on flesh, especially if it is another’s? And how the very worldliness of it– the tangibility of it, the fleshly aspect of flesh– is itself illusion because what we say we can touch, grasp, can’t we also at once taste, smell? And isn’t that like God– unseen yet reflected in everything; non-corporeal yet felt, touched, tasted, yet just out of reach, something one always longs to get closer to?     I know desire is like that, is like God, is divine. Desire is consuming, maddening, ecstatic, unattainable, insatiable. Like how you can make love to someone and with their flesh tightly against yours, their flesh inside yours, you still crave more and more and closer, deeper, more intimate, more real, tangible….And how the orgasmic climax can shake you violently, but it’s not something you can touch, hold, keep, or even see– but it moves you, like God. Divine.  

  I taste oshun’s honey– but also Erzulie Freda’s tears…Crying at the limits of life and love; she, most desirable of women and goddesses, mistress to innumerable men and gods, yet always ultimately alone, love unrequited and left unsatisfied. Oshun, too, is always left alone somehow, retreating to the forest, washing her fine white dress yellow in the river that is as transitory and intangible as she is, as love is (for she, too, controls and embodies the river, as she does love and sensuality, which in themselves are fluid and flowing like water, like the river)– never still, content, but always flowing onto something different, onto better, rivers continually flowing to reach the ocean…    Oshun reminds me there’s a joy I haven’t claimed, a beauty I haven’t found, a sensuality I haven’t yet unleashed in myself I must keep searching and striving for. My hand between my legs, I feel great heat yet haven’t yet understood how to consume myself in it; yes, others have partaken of me, of it, have felt its blaze and proclaimed its goodness, but I have not been fulfilled in myself, by myself…    I would like to have been able to tell my child I enjoyed the sin of its conception, that at least the pleasure of an orgasm had accompanied the unexpected, unasked for fertilization. But the gorwing seed is a joy now, my joy, now quite the surprise gift I can’t wait to unwrap from myself and find a new piece or reflection of a new me. There is joy in that, in my coming motherhood, the journey of pregnancy and childbirth itself a blessing of Oshun’s. But besides the Divine state of Motherhood, I’d still like to find my uninhibited sensual side that pleases me and not just a role I play to please my man– but fully realized, fully integrated with my motherhood and my spirituality.    I’m still looking, though I’ve come closer than I used to be, to “marry the two Marys”– the Magdalene and the Virgin/Mother.