ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 53
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been
made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For
this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of
the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the
pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic,
for it represents the suppression of true feeling.
For every one of us who sat in classrooms for years at tables cutting off
our lower bodies and disconnecting us from our gut, intuition and sexual and
reproductive organs, in bodies trained to be obedient and desires overpowered,
it is imperative now, as a precursor to reimagining, to be in our bodies and
reconnect with our centers where Eros lives and where life begins. If we don’t
know where our own desire lives, we leave the door open for someone else to
tell us who and how to love, what to want, why to learn; to traumatize us and
shrink our creative power, only to then fill us up with the desires of empire. We
will not re-imagine. We will reproduce. We will replicate.
Friends, trauma and scarcity may be what we’ve inherited, but like every
ancestor in our collective tapestry, it is what we will spend our limited
humxn lifetimes attempting to not pass on. Decolonizing requires healing
from this trauma and healing trauma requires accessing and staying in
our bodies and desires. That makes decolonizing education a queer thing
to do. It very literally requires turning our bodies back on, reclaiming
them from dusty, colonial and traumatized parameters of gender
expression and scarce options for who and how to love.
Queerness has the power to dom the empire out of us. I’m re-imagining
the pain of decolonizing as the key to our deepest pleasure. I’m fantasizing
about decolonial education that happens in bodies that move with the kind
of freedom that tells the story of radical self love. Teaching that happens
between people who long for each other because we know that the wholeness
we seek is in our interconnectivity. Learning on land that we love like the
body of a lover, the learning of lovers as whole landscapes.
Loving this way will be how we know we are alive.8
—Kate
We hold secrets. We all do. We hold them in varying degrees on a spectrum from very harmful to not
so harmful. We’ve got to find a way for the shadows to come into full bloom, as in abundance so they’re
not secret and hidden away. When they’re secret and held hidden, they hold way too much power over
us. And our ability to be free.
8 Kate Morales, https://ecoversities.org/queerness-taught-me-that-an-open-letter-to-the-radical-educators-of-the-ecoverseand-beyond/
Healing Love: Into Balance | A Brown Paper
53