Sensuality is about circles rather than straight lines…

Look at the photos below. Each one evokes different feelings depending on your unique sets of appetites, circumstances and orientation. You might feel texture, colour, shade, beauty, anticipation, time, memory, revulsion, attraction, closer, further away, sweet, sour, yes please, no thank you, maybe tomorrow, I remember when, first love, first loss, and so on.

These are fundamentally “sensual” feelings. Of the senses. To be “sensual” is simply to be immersed in your senses as deeply as possible, and to be having circular conversations with yourself and the world around you about the depth and character of your senses.

You will die one day so you must taste widely today and every day, to remind the soul that our human instincts are hundreds of thousands of years old, and that we are eternally curious and tactile, feeling and breathing, reaching and touching, bringing things closer and then further away, constantly assessing their effect on our brains and emotions. Our senses only have meaning because of memory, and then our memories make us by telling us what to touch and taste, and what not to. Sometimes we live in the funhouse of jostling our senses between now and before, seeing if we can rewrite a memory by pushing further. The soul delights at this sort of play.

That said, our bodies have urges, plain as day. These quickly turn into physical straight lines. We satisfy our cravings. But the soul likes circles, conversations, lingerings, left turns, pauses, and the incubating of memory. How sweet does something taste when you’ve had to wait for it, suffer for it, work for it, dream about it, give reverence to it? Then it moves from being something ordinary and mechanical to something soulful because we revered it, cared for it, and surrounded it with our thoughts and feelings.

Sensuality, then, is simply having longer conversations within and with others about what feels good, what looks interesting, what is, what isn’t, and what might be. The more energy we have, the more impulses and instincts we indulge and make real, and the more we taste freely and widely. Then we can begin to decide and discern between what is merely good and what is actually great–even transcendent.

Sensuality is about the child in us finding tinier and more beautiful dolls nested within each other, our delight and intrigue increasing with each one.

Sensuality is about being after something ever more interesting to the soul’s ever flickering eye. It’s about being after circles rather than straight lines.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you sensuality is about sex. They are different planets that occasionally meet and crash land together. Sex is temporary but sensuality is an elaborate conversation within each of us that never ends and always bends.