Document text
- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels October 8, 2004 I'll Shut Up -Right After This Cuddling in a time of war John Darling Pillows and quilts cover the floor. Space music plays. Tea is served (no alcohol). Most of us know each other. Clad in jammies, we lay down and, after an initial sharing about how nervous we are and how we've all felt we wanted to be closer to people, we begin the first known Cuddle Party in Southern Oregon. In a time when, as a society, we're being told to be afraid, very afraid, this hug-in is nice, very nice. Hands roam, legs entwine, faces are caressed, sore shoulders are rubbed, necks and cheeks are nuzzled and kissed - but no kissing on the lips unless both agree. No grinding either. You might think there would be hushed erotic preoccupation, but instead people giggle a lot, crack jokes, confess fears, talk about their lives, how they're struggling, succeeding, failing with parenting chores, bills, relationships, loneliness - life. And how we want love. Engaging our nervousness, we fall into mock English accents, saying stuff like, "I say there Greg, start up the CD again, then come back over here and love us, old boy, wot?" And, "Dash it, you are a lovely lass, aren't you now, Laura? Don't we think she's beautiful?" She laughs and says how she loves cuddling because you get to really experience how people smell. These parties have become a fad in the trendy capitols of the nation, where they charge $30 a person. This one is free. It's a spinoff of Burning Man, where Merrill, the creator of this party, served as a Love Ho' - a group set up to hug and stroke people and tell them "I love you," - this based on the phenomenon that our nation is under-hugged and rarely told we are loved. That lack isolates us and leads to thoughts that the reason people don�t hug us and say I love you is because, well, there must be something wrong with us. This, in turn, gets reciprocated by our thinking there's something wrong with others a.k.a. judging, resenting, polarizing, which eventually gets translated globally into, well, pick up the newspaper and read it for yourself. We're literally dying to be hugged. So goes the philosophy of Love Ho's. If that sounds hippy-dippy and dumb, it's a lot harder to argue with than why we're killing people in Iraq and blowing $200 billion to do it. Afterward, a not infrequent cuddle party "hangover" is a sense of uneasiness and regret for having let yourself go, for having shed the boundaries ego has worked so hard to establish all your life. The ego - ("Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain over there" - Oz) can reproach you with shame as it tries to reestablish its defense perimeter. Exploring this later with friends, I realize that, while you may feel isolation and shame the next day, at a deeper level it's not about individual psychology at all. There's nothing that can be "worked through." The pain is much simpler. It's grief from loss of the tribe, something I believe we all suffer all of our lives and write off with such names as anomie, existential angst, the Lost Generation - even depression. The persistent subconscious sorrow, which started 10 millennia ago, when we first piled one stone on top another to make our dwellings apart from the tribe, also encompasses unspoken pain from the loss of an inherent spirituality that sprang, like grass, from this natural ground of being, made sense to all of us and was readily accessible now, not later in heaven. However, in the midst of a cuddle puddle, you know there is no personal alienation, inadequacy - and certainly not shame - but rather a sense that this is oddly familiar, even instinctive. Everyone knows how to behave. Everyone knows the decorum, without having to speak it. Of course we will respect each other. We can sense what the other person wants, needs, welcomes - or not. It's very much like what oneself wants, needs, welcomes. I have done this before, the soul whispers. I know this. It's woven into what Jung called the collective unconscious, the genetic memory. We are laying about happily talking, stroking, laughing, loving - ah, yes, of course, it was those couple million years in the caves of Europe, the jungles of Java, the savannah of East Africa and it's what bonded the tribe and wove us together, so we would know every cache of berries and nuts as our berries and nuts, every child as our child, every cave as our cave and every person as our person, our self. It's the great leveler, the great uniter, because it's the great ego eraser. In the cuddle pile, you don't think - oh, I want to go over there and hug that one person, because he/she is hot or better, more desirable. You find that to love the one you're with is exactly what is natural and what you're supposed to be doing. Everyone has become equal. Everyone has become "my tribe." It feels exactly as good to intimately hug two or three people as it does one. You can practically hear the ego shriek as, like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy tossed water on her, she dissolves. Ann gives me a kiss, looks in my eyes and says I'm so glad you're here. Yes, I say. I realize she would say that to any person here and that it would be true. I'm not special as some kind of neat individual who has earned this love. It just is. We are born knowing we deserve it, but conditioned to believe must to earn it by a display of individual accomplishment, power, independence. I come home and watch West Side Story, the musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and a major piece of my youthful conditioning to romantic love. I weep with unspeakable longing and joy, as always, when Maria and Tony open to this amazing miracle of love. But, wait. I stop the video. What is this really saying? It's saying that, far from being plentiful and natural as the grass, love, this greatest gift in life - is rare and hard to find in the extreme. And, it is soon trashed by a world teeming with mad, violent, isolated egos. Maria (as Mary) tells Tony (as Christ), hey, it's not about our love - you have to stop the gang violence and bring love to the world, the big tribe. Like Christ, Tony gets blown away trying to do that. They didn't know about cuddle parties. We do. Their sense of the rarity of love - and that it could only be found in that one, special, right person, who is meant just for you (and this springing out of the limitations of having just nuclear family parents, rather than a village to raise you), made them crazy. They were martyrs for love, literally dying for it. We know better now. Contact John Darling, an Ashland writer and counselor, at [email protected]. DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams