Dreaming and Waking

Moments of Devastating Beauty

The sun is setting. The spring has been so cold and drawn out this year that the onset of summer feels sudden. The air's still warm tonight, but there's a breeze tossing the leaves and my hair. Someone's barbequing down the street; the air smells of campfire.

I can close my eyes and be at the campfire. We're far enough from the light pollution to really see the stars, far and cold. The lake is on one side, the tents and cabins on the other. By the light of the fire, all that's visible are the first two rings of log benches circling the fire pit.

There are about a dozen drummers. They aren't all very good, but the ones who are pull the others along. I'm sitting three rows back from the fire, wrapped in my black cloak and my anonymity. The drummers aren't all great, but the ones who are pull at me, make me need to move. The drums are like another heartbeat. I wait as others get up and start swaying. Finally, I drop my self-consciousness and my cloak and I move to the edge of the fire. The flames are on one side, the drums on the other. I look at the stars.

I dance first for the stars, because they don't care. I reach for them and sway.

Around the fire, other dancers shimmy their hips. They bend and twist. Their long skirts and scarves flicker like another circle of flames.

The fire makes us all too hot, and we begin to remove clothing. It isn't a striptease – we shed shirts like dead petals.

My hips circle to the rhythm effortlessly, mindlessly. The world is reduced to the fire and the drums and the dancers. We are all entranced together.

The natural flow of the dancing takes me around to the other side of the fire. The lake is on one side, the fire and drums on the other. There's only the dark water, the fire, and the beat in my hips and hands.

The drummers falter, and my body slows as they work to bring the beat back together. I look up at the stars. All the dancers and drummers together are still only a tiny spark in the night.

My Most Annoying Personality Trait

When I first get into work on Sunday mornings, I turn all the highlighters cap down, make sure the pens and scissors are in the correct slots in the desk organizer, flip the ruler so it sticks out the left side of the file holder, and return the stapler, post-it notes, and calculator to the correct spots. My Friday assistant always shifts things around when she uses my desk; I need everything in its place before I start to work.

***

"I have a plan. I always have a plan."

***

It was like something straight out of a Judy Blume novel (Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, to be exact):

"Everyone take two pieces of paper and write your name on them both. On one, write Good Things and on the other, Bad Things, or Not So Good Things, if you prefer. Then we will all write about each other’s best qualities and worst qualities on the sheets."

I took the leader's Bad Things paper first and wrote on it in my big handwriting: "I think this is a passive-aggressive exercise and if you have anything to tell me about my personality, you can tell me to my face." As we all grabbed papers at random in the half-hour that followed, I always knew who had that paper because they would look at me and chuckle.

At the end of the exercise, I stuffed my papers into my purse unread. At home, I dropped them into a desk drawer and forgot about them. I came across them months later while looking for something else.

I don't remember anything from either page except for one Not So Good Thing entry: "Sometimes you get a little 'my-way-or-the-highway'."

"Just a little?" I asked.

***

"There is a plan. Don't fuck with the plan."

***

I am going to start training a new assistant at work tomorrow. Wish him luck.

Orange highlighter for the customers with changes to their deliveries. All the grocery codes are written in black ink: a four letter code, one space, a slash, one more space, then the next code. Circle them in blue highlighter. Notes to the customers are highlighted in green; packing instructions in yellow; packing instructions in pink. Bin counts in blue pen. Office notes in red pen.

I have very specific ways of doing every tiny task. I always have a reason for doing things the exact way I do, but sometimes my reasons don't seem important to other people. I seem controlling and obsessive...

***

"Just stick with the plan, and everything will work out perfectly."

Sexual Ethics

"How many people here have sex with the lights on?" the teacher sat cross legged on his desk and looked at us evenly. Some of us looked back at him and raised our hands immediately; others giggled and blushed and either raised hands tentatively or not at all.

We came mostly in pairs – couples – to take a class on "Getting Down and Dirty with Mother Earth – Greener Sex". The teacher was dressed in jeans and an unbleached cotton shirt with a mandarin collar.

"Thank you," he acknowledged our raised hands, "That's the first thing to cut out. Keeping the lights on is an unnecessary waste of electricity. If you want a bit of mood lighting, consider some LED Christmas lights."

I wrote Xmas LEDs instead of lights on my notepad.

"What about candles?" a student by the window asked.

"Well, beeswax might be an acceptable choice, if you aren't vegan, of course, but don't get cheap candles. They're made with petrochemicals."

I wrote beeswax candles? and drew a bumble bee and some flowers.

"But, even better, if you want to be able to see each other, just have sex during the day."

Someone at the back giggled like a middle school student in their first sex ed class.

At the end of the class, the page of my notebook is covered with instructions.

The bedroom: organic cotton sheets, furniture made of sustainably harvested wood, and compact fluorescent bulbs.

Romance: organic and locally grown fruit, organic and locally made wines, and fair trade chocolate (in moderation – shipped from overseas = larger carbon footprint).

Sex play: shower together (save water during foreplay), organic hemp cuffs, modifying second hand clothing for role playing costumes, and sex toys (durable – buy to last – rechargeable batteries).

"It is hard to choose a good lubricant. Avoid petroleum-based ones, of course. There are some commercially made ones that are water-based or made with hemp oil, but simplest of all would be some organic extra virgin olive oil."

Smell like salad dressing, I noted.

"It really comes down to seeking out the most natural products and getting as close to how things used to be, before plastics and chemicals, as we can."

"When did sex get so complicated?" my partner whispered as he looked over my pages of notes: products, ideas, resources, instructions.

"Doing the right thing has always been complicated," I whispered back.

"Sex can be the most natural thing in the world," the teacher said, "if we really work at it."

Fiction inspired by “The Greenpeace Guide to Environmentally-Friendly Sex”.