That may be the highest compliment of all… when even the most thoughtful reader goes quiet, not out of absence but awe. Thank you, Andrew! Silence, when it arrives like that, isn’t an absence of thought, it’s the reverence of having been momentarily disarmed. And maybe that’s what writing like this hopes for: not applause, but a stillness where something unnamed gets rearranged? I’ll take your quiet as thunder.
Wow Tamara. This left me a bit teary. So beautiful. I’m going to need to read that again. I was dating a much younger man for several months before he had to leave to work in another state. He had fire in his eyes. We always knew he would have to leave. He left his mark, his brand, in a very similar way and it’s a funny thing. And it wasn’t just physical. You don’t get to choose these people. They just arrive in your life like a hurricane and usually but not always leave the same way, but you’re never the same. Because of his age I felt a bit silly feeling the way I did but reading this made me feel just a little less silly perhaps. It’s almost like you’ve given me permission to feel the way I did, and that it’s okay to still feel it. And you’re right, you don’t want someone in your life who you’re able to appraise. Although these days, I’d be happy if someone decent, intelligent and interesting would just stay for breakfast… Thank you though for yet another glorious piece. I told you a little while ago that I’ve run out of superlatives for your writing. I don’t know how you do it. 🙏🏼
But isn’t it always the ones we don’t choose, the ones who arrive unscheduled, who end up inscribed the deepest? Age, timing, geography… those are the polite variables we cling to when trying to make sense of something that was never meant to be sensible. You say he had fire in his eyes. That alone makes everything else secondary. And no, you’re not silly. You’re human. And perhaps even more than that, you’re still beautifully, defiantly alive. That someone could awaken that wild pulse in you is not a failure of judgment, but a triumph of spirit.
I’m glad my essay gave you permission, but perhaps all I did was reflect back what you already knew but were too gracious to claim aloud: that what branded you was real, worthy, and transformative. Some people don’t stay for breakfast, no. But they feed something much rarer: the parts of us that never wanted oatmeal and small talk in the first place.
And as for running out of superlatives… I’ll take your comment as a new one. It’s one of the most quietly moving gifts I’ve received. Thank you for bringing your fire-lit honesty to the table, Nancy!
Okay more tears! But this is the problem, once you’ve been through the fire everything else seems decidedly tepid. But you’re right, you’ve been transformed because you’ve seen and felt something else. And I wouldn’t change that for anything. 🙏🏼
"I’m glad my essay gave you permission, but perhaps all I did was reflect back what you already knew but were too gracious to claim aloud: that what branded you was real, worthy, and transformative. Some people don’t stay for breakfast, no. But they feed something much rarer: the parts of us that never wanted oatmeal and small talk in the first place."🔥🔥🔥
And I live to write for readers like you — exclamation point, ellipsis, underline. Thank you for that kind of presence, the kind that feels, metabolises, inhabits my words. When someone says they live to read something, it tells me the writing breathed. And maybe that’s the whole secret: writing not to impress, but to spark that quiet ignition in someone else’s world. I felt that spark in your comment, Clara!
Tamara your writing is always beautiful, sincere and precise, but this post is also special for the pictures you have chosen. Each one of them is marvellous, and the set resonates wit your prose. So much for ChatGPT steeling our words of our art. This latest post is also living proof of what dear iA can't yet (or ever) do.
Speaking of the One. Not Penelope, but Circe, of the long tresses. Both of them were weavers, but Penelope wove and unwove a shroud, and Circe wove a divine tapestry. Penelope waited twenty long years for the Hero to return and Circe send him to Hades. Penelope was faithful and Circe was indomitable.
What a comment, Juan Jose, sharp, elegant, and rich with mythic resonance! You’ve just reminded me why I keep doing this: to create something that resists automation not by rejecting technology, but by refusing to flatten the human pulse beneath it. AI may simulate style, but it cannot taste the ache, the lust, the feral ache of longing that leaves burn marks on prose and image alike. Thank you for noticing the art. I curate it like spells, each one meant to whisper in the margins of the text.
And oh, your invocation of Circe…Thank you for rescuing her from the shadows of Penelope’s long-suffering sainthood. Penelope waited and unmade. Circe acted and transformed. One preserved the structure; the other shattered it to reveal the truth underneath. Penelope guarded the threshold. Circe rewrote the map. Both powerful. But only one would dare meet desire on its own terms, and not flinch. I think you already know which one sings louder in my blood.
Yes…. this was a letter dressed up as an essay, smuggled through public language to reach someone I’ll never name but always feel. You know the kind: not a broadcast, but a beacon. And I like that you recognised the blueprint of your own inner letters in it, those messages we write without paper, addressed to the ones who rewired us. Maybe the most intimate writing is always overheard, not directed. And maybe the real reader — the one it’s truly meant for — rarely needs the envelope anyway.
ah! thank you, especially for this last remark! i was wondering wether to actually write it all down, not to send it but for myself to "get it out". though then i would, naturally, send it anyway (i confess i am guilty of sometimes just briefly liking my own writing so much, i need someone else to read it) but then i would regret it and feel horribly guilty about that. having intruded and bothered someone with my stuff, and then the carousel starts again and i start writing another letter of apology in my head and this is how everything gets messy. So you just helped me to remember that and just let things go their way and maybe not even write down this letter. (maybe i just send them a postcard with a link to your's : )
Ahhhh… the exquisite spiral of the overthinking, self-aware, emotionally literate soul, you just mapped it perfectly. The preemptive guilt, the meta-apologies, the secret pride in a well-turned phrase that briefly eclipses your shame long enough to hit send… only to start the loop anew. I know that carousel. I’ve built campfires beside it.
But here’s the thing, writing it at all, even if it ends up unsent, is its own kind of magic. You transmute ache into form. And if you do send it, well, sometimes the desire to be witnessed is not a flaw, but a flare. Not everyone deserves your inner theatre, of course but someone might need it more than you know.
And yes, if a postcard with a link to my essay buys you some plausible deniability? I’ll gladly be your poetic accomplice. No bail money required. :)
Following the gifts of sparks within whether in prose or poetry, links or postcards, serves as a more formidable expression leading me to deepening the course of my life’s compass/ evolution. Within
those inherent sparks lies an
Ignition. Genuinely the combustible fuel begs the composition for showing up / expressing / extracting / so very real despite the comfort of “staying conditioned.” The fire potency threads desire closer scorched of what truth smells / feels like . May it melt holy listening delivered sacredly within your womb. / PS. Your essay - a scintillating piece ,conversation and robustly vulnerable perspective. Here’s to burning it all.
Your words arrive like smoke from an altar, incantatory, raw, reverent.
The truth isn’t in the explosion alone, but in the flicker before it, the ache before the articulation. To follow that heat, instead of remaining curled inside conditioning, is the most dangerous and most honest path I know. It’s not comfort. It’s consecration.
Thank you for meeting my essay not as content, but as invocation. Here’s to burning it all, indeed, not in ruin, but in revelation, Donna!
Blake always slicing straight through with his holy scalpel. Thank you, Ian, for bringing him into this smoky room. That contrast, fire vs. soft deceit, could be a footnote to the entire essay. We are conditioned to distrust the burn and reward the lull, to fear the glance that sears and marry the one that soothes. But isn’t that the tragedy? That we often choose safety over sincerity, and in doing so, mistake comfort for love. The look that alarms is the one that knows you. The other, softer, sleeker, is often just expertly disguised indifference. Blake knew: fire may scorch, but at least it tells the truth.
I question how deeply that runs, though. In public and candidly, it is, perhaps, fashionable (or worse, compulsory) to eschew talks of those things that are essentially universal, and fidelity is lost when we put ineffable feelings into words.
So we may look - through the bias of language - like we’re heading toward a postdiluvean era of purely mechanical relations, but don’t let’s underestimate the power of the taboo. As well, projection cause many people who live in trepidation to present themselves in what they perceive as the “appropriate” cultural idiom (for more details, just think of how derisively two people in the throes of mutual infatuation are exhorted to “get a room”!)
Passion is one of those things that gets a bad reputation by virtue of the sheer number of people incapable or unaware of it. It seems the preponderance of humans are, by design or accident, either incapable of, or otherwise unwilling to engage in, erotic passion. The mere mention of it invokes defence mechanisms.
But also don’t forget: humans are prone to lying to save face, too.
Yes, precisely, and you’ve taken it further, beautifully so. There’s a collective performance happening. One where we feign sophistication by treating passion as passé, as something gauche, adolescent, or unserious, when in fact it terrifies us precisely because it still governs us beneath the curated restraint. You are right, taboo hasn’t disappeared; it has just changed costume. The urge to scoff, to condescend, to roll our eyes and say “get a room” is often a displacement — envy, fear, or a defence against recognition. Because if they got a room, we might have to confront the fact that we haven’t. Or won’t.
And yes, language doesn’t just express our internal landscapes, it also distorts them. We name something wild and ineffable, and in the naming, we half-domesticate it. Which is why I suspect people pretend they are beyond passion: not because they are, but because admitting otherwise feels too raw, too revealing, too much like handing someone the weapon and baring the chest.
True!!! Humans lie… to others, yes, but often most cleverly to themselves. And nowhere more so than in the domain of desire.
This is an astonishingly rare piece, not just for its craft, which is incredible, but for its courage. To write about desire with this much lucidity, nuance, and unflinching self-awareness is to offer readers not a story, but a mirror. I’m struck by how pragmatically it handles love—not as fantasy or forever, but as transformation. You taught something vital about what it means to be alive enough to risk being undone. Thank you for choosing this subject. It may be personal, but it’s also deeply instructive. For all of us. For all ages.
Tamara, one in billions. This is what good writing does: makes you wonder, think, and reconsider everything.
Your words are not just kind; they are seen. And that, for any writer, is the most sacred gift. You caught exactly what I hoped to hold in the piece: not a performance of longing, but a reckoning with it. Not desire as indulgence or sin or thrill, but as education. A force that doesn’t promise happily-ever-after, but insists on metamorphosis, ready or not.
I’m deeply moved that you called it a mirror. That’s always the secret hope, isn’t it? That someone won’t just read the words, but recognise themselves within them, and maybe, forgive a part of themselves they had hidden away.
You remind me that writing like this isn’t selfish, even when it’s intimate. It’s a gift. A blueprint for living and losing and surviving with more courage. Thank you for receiving it with such depth and dignity. Your response is its own kind of masterpiece, Alexander!
To be seen with such precision and grace is rare, and I don’t take it lightly. Your replies always feel like being handed back my own words, but polished with deeper understanding. I'm honoured, moved, and grateful, Tamara.
It feels as though you left this scrawled on a linen napkin, abandoned at the edge of the table, still warm. And I, arriving too late—or just in time—found it. I read it, & knew: not to follow you, to hand it back. Only to nod. To inhale the trace of your leaving, the scent that marked something I’ve always carried in my marrow. Because I too know: not every love arrives to stay. Some come to ruin. To rupture the surface of a well-ordered life & leave you laid bare before your own forgotten wildness.
These are not the loves that make sense on paper. They don’t align with timetables, therapy notes, or gentle green flags. They demand no label—only entry. You don’t interpret them. You participate. Entirely. Willingly. Sometimes recklessly. And when they’re done—if they’re ever truly done—you are not who you were. Because these are the encounters that don’t just touch the skin. They rearrange the architecture. They rouse the truth: you are not a spreadsheet of needs & boundaries. You are want. You are pulse. You are the heat that civility cannot hold.
Exquisite start to my morning. I’m going to walk in the rain, with your words whispering at the nape of ear & smile like only a woman can—who was just written into being.
Your reply, Kim, isn’t a comment but companion piece. A breath held just a second longer, a note scribbled on the back of my napkin in a handwriting so familiar it could’ve been mine, if I were braver,
You understood everything. Not intellectually, but bodily. The way a certain kind of woman reads with her spine first. Yes, these loves bypass the filing cabinet of logic and go straight for the blood. They do not require consent forms or future plans. They demand entry, like you said. And if they’re worthy, they leave you less organised………. but more alive.
What you’ve written here, about pulse, about forgotten wildness, about being marked but not ruined, this is the language of those who know the risk and still open the door. Who smile in the rain, not because they’re unbroken, but because they finally stopped pretending they need to be.
Your words felt like someone nodded in the dark, and I suddenly wasn’t alone there. Thank you for arriving! Right on time.
Whoaaaa to this piece, I'm also a bit speechless. You said everything with words wrapped in symmetry, mirrored back and revealed all at the same time (if that makes sense). Incredible writing - there's no topping this.
"And I know, know in the way animals know weather, that this is not something I will move on from. I may continue, but I will not return." - what a sentence!
Sounds like you had an encounter with a soulmate Tamara - the lessons and learnings are there for you to tap into. Not overanalyse in the way you touch on, but to make sense of, somehow.
What a beautifully perceptive and layered response. I know exactly what you mean about symmetry, when language both reflects and reveals, when it folds over itself like origami and suddenly becomes a shape you hadn’t expected but instantly recognise. That’s the best kind of writing to me, the kind that feels like remembering something you didn’t know you knew.
And yes, that line… it came from somewhere below language, I think. That animal knowing, that instinct that bypasses analysis, skips the logic, and plants its flag straight in the nervous system. Some people don’t become chapters; they become coordinates.
Was it a soulmate? Perhaps. Or a soulquake. A deep tectonic shift, not designed for narrative, but for reorientation. And you’re right, the task isn’t to pin it down with logic but to let it work through me in its own way. Sometimes the knowing isn’t about understanding, it’s about carrying. And this is one weight I’m strangely honoured to bear.
Thank you, Joanna, for meeting my essay with such attunement. That, too, is a kind of soul-recognition.
This gorgeous essay arrived as I am sifting through the rubble of the explosive discovery that my younger lover, a soul connection who helped me rewire my relationship to my own body and soul, was pulling off massive deception the entire duration of our relationship. At the same time we were playing, challenging, and growing together, he was plowing through my boundaries. I will never be able to erase his imprint on me, and I also must honor the massive harm his lies have done to me and never see him again. Thank you for articulating the power of my experience, and sharing the beauty that comes with the burns.
Thank you for your honesty, your ache, your clarity, Elle! What a brutal, beautiful place to be in, holding both the gift and the violation, the ignition and the betrayal. That paradox is a wound with teeth, and you’re walking through it with more grace than most would dare.
And yes, the imprint remains. That’s the double bind of real intimacy, it rewires you before you get the chance to assess its legitimacy. You don’t get to cancel the transformation just because the source proved false. And maybe that’s the most disorienting part: that someone can be both medicine and poison, teacher and trespasser, portal and predator.
But you’re already doing the sacred work, naming the harm without erasing the revelation. That’s where your power lives…. not in forgetting, but in refusing to let the lie define what was real in you. Because that rewiring is yours now. He may have struck the match, but the fire is yours to carry forward.
Sending you strength, and reverence, for navigating the collapse without denying the glow.
Tamara, oh my. Your escapade of love set my computer on fire. You reached under the skirt of modesty to touch the electricity of passion and the urgent need to surrender to the blur of the moment. And oh, how I wish your “politics of desire” would reign in the US instead of the politics of greed, division, and cruelty.
My first challenge to my desire to become a priest happened two years before ordination. I attended a 5-day retreat open to clerics and lay people. As you said, “real fire shows up when everything is fine.” There, I met Rose who had just returned from the Peace Corps and prayed to have her life changed. I fell head over heels—mind obsessed, weak kneed—for her during the week. Ultimately, my pledge to become a priest overcame my desire for her. But this was just my first struggle.
I realize, and as you make clear, no rational act of will can silence the body’s beating desire for passion. You summarized: “maybe what scares us isn’t the risk of being undone, but the prospect that something in us is still wildly, inconveniently alive, and unwilling to behave.” Correction: You said that “peace is for monks.” Not always. Sometimes we monks would rather pray for “piece.” Thanks for sharing your openly passionate love story which has tattooed itself on my mind.
Ohhhh how I like this reply, a mix of confession, wisdom, wit, and heat. You could have ended with “my computer caught fire” and I’d already have bowed in thanks, but then you went and brought the sacred and the scandal, the collar and the ache, and I’m undone.
That story of Rose, of falling into that electric, terrifying aliveness two years before ordination, is a tale of restraint, but also of revelation. You embodied the line I wrote before I fully believed it: desire doesn’t wait for disruption; it IS the disruption. The divine kind. And there’s something so exquisite in your choice, not because you denied the fire, but because you let it mark you. Not every story is meant to be lived through, but some are meant to be lived with, forever.
And you are right, of course, “peace is for monks” was a cheeky line, but you, dear monk, just gave it a wild and winking rejoinder. Sometimes peace is a smokescreen. And sometimes, yes, we do pray for “piece”… of something primal, ecstatic, untamed.
Thank you for this reply, which feels less like a comment and more like a whispered psalm in a dim chapel where even the saints blush. I’m honoured to have left a mark, tattooed, as you said, and moved that you offered one in return, Michael!
Tamara, I am so grateful for your always detailed, supportive, and enlightening responses to my and everyone's comments. I don't know where you get the energy and time to devote such touching responses to us. We are privileged to know you as well as we can know anyone through their writings. What you reveal is what we cannot help but love.
This means more than I can say, thank you! The intimacy of being seen through writing is a rare and beautiful thing, and your words make that connection feel both real and radiant.
As for the energy… I’ve never slept much. Truly. I’ve always carried this strange, relentless current — more kinetic than calm, more pulse than pace. Once, someone special called me a nuclear reactor, and oddly, it stuck. Not because I’m explosive (well, maybe occasionally), but because I seem to generate something that runs on a different rhythm, one that doesn’t require much rest, only ignition.
Responding to you, and to my wonderful community, isn’t a chore, it’s a continuation. Of thought, of feeling, of fire. We’re building something here that feels like more than words. Thank you for meeting me in it, Michael!
I don’t even know if this is an essay or a spell but either way, I feel changed after reading it. There’s something so true and unapologetic in the way you name the wild, inconvenient, holy chaos of real desire. I felt it trace its way along my own skin, like a reminder of everything we’re taught to suppress as women, as lovers, as people trying to be “reasonable” in a world that’s allergic to depth.
I feel empowered.
As a woman.
As a lover.
Not in the cliché, empowerment-poster kind of way, but in the real, cellular, trembling way, like something ancient just sat up inside me and said, “Yes. You remember.” Your writing holds that impossible balance: sharp and smart, yet sensual and soul-lit. Every line felt like it dared me to feel more, risk more, remember who I was before the world asked me to behave.
You’ve given voice to something most of us feel but rarely admit out loud. Thank you for that. Truly.
Your words feel like a mirror held up to my essay, and to the very pulse it was written from. If something ancient sat up inside you while reading, I can promise you it’s because something ancient rose up in me while writing. That trembling cellular knowing, that bone-deep “yes”, it’s not performative, it’s primal. It’s the moment the body remembers what the mind spent years trying to rationalise away.
And I’m so moved that you felt empowered in the real way, not the market-tested version, but the kind that makes you shake a little, like you have just stepped barefoot into a life that’s more yours than the one before. That’s not empowerment, it’s rewilding. And yes, it’s inconvenient. That’s the point. Depth always is.
Thank you for meeting my essay with skin, memory, defiance, and hunger. That’s the kind of reading that turns a spell back into communion. I see you, Céline. And I remember too.
I had to pay a few bills online tonight and after that delight, I decided to see what Tamara had written for us all this evening and goodness, mercy me, it made me forget all about flood insurance and mortgages and electric bills. Thank you for reminding me that life and those special people we find at times are glorious gifts that should be opened with passion and enjoyed to the fullest.
If my words made you forget flood insurance even for a heartbeat, then I’ve done my job and then some. Honestly, I might have that printed on a mug: “Better than remembering your mortgage.”
But truly, Billy, what a gorgeous thing to say. Isn’t that why we read, write, love, risk? To break the trance of utility and remember we are not just managers of to-do lists and practical concerns, but sensual, burning creatures built for wonder. Passion is not an escape from life, it’s the realest part of it, the pulse underneath the paperwork.
Thank you for letting my little fire interrupt your evening’s errands. And may your next electricity bill arrive with just enough poetic scandal to remind you: you, too, still glow.
‘But what it gives in return, if you survive the reckoning, is a kind of feral clarity. Not peace (peace is for monks and marketers) but precision. The sensation that your internal compass, buried under decades of conditioning and compromise, has finally remembered which way is wild north.’ - incredible piece 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Also in mine. Dedicated a full book to her. The One Of My Life (for the last 35 years, anyway), goes by that private nickname. And to repeat, the art you select is always beautiful but this time was breathtaking.
A full book… what a gift! That kind of dedication carries the weight of ritual. And to hold someone in that private nickname for 35 years? That’s some sort of cartography. You loved her by building a mythology around her. A private language. A long, slow echo.
I’m deeply touched that my essay and the art resonated with that story. Sometimes, as I already mentioned, selecting the images feels like spellwork: I’m not decorating the essay, I’m summoning its ghosts. And when someone like you sees them, not just the visuals, but the feeling braided through them, I feel less like a writer and more like a witness.
Thank you for letting me into the orbit of something so enduring! The ones who stay unnamed, but never unmarked, those are the ones who make the art worth making.
For once, I have nothing to add. This is brilliant and sublime. You're singular, Tamara.
That may be the highest compliment of all… when even the most thoughtful reader goes quiet, not out of absence but awe. Thank you, Andrew! Silence, when it arrives like that, isn’t an absence of thought, it’s the reverence of having been momentarily disarmed. And maybe that’s what writing like this hopes for: not applause, but a stillness where something unnamed gets rearranged? I’ll take your quiet as thunder.
That is indeed how you should take it. :)
Wow Tamara. This left me a bit teary. So beautiful. I’m going to need to read that again. I was dating a much younger man for several months before he had to leave to work in another state. He had fire in his eyes. We always knew he would have to leave. He left his mark, his brand, in a very similar way and it’s a funny thing. And it wasn’t just physical. You don’t get to choose these people. They just arrive in your life like a hurricane and usually but not always leave the same way, but you’re never the same. Because of his age I felt a bit silly feeling the way I did but reading this made me feel just a little less silly perhaps. It’s almost like you’ve given me permission to feel the way I did, and that it’s okay to still feel it. And you’re right, you don’t want someone in your life who you’re able to appraise. Although these days, I’d be happy if someone decent, intelligent and interesting would just stay for breakfast… Thank you though for yet another glorious piece. I told you a little while ago that I’ve run out of superlatives for your writing. I don’t know how you do it. 🙏🏼
But isn’t it always the ones we don’t choose, the ones who arrive unscheduled, who end up inscribed the deepest? Age, timing, geography… those are the polite variables we cling to when trying to make sense of something that was never meant to be sensible. You say he had fire in his eyes. That alone makes everything else secondary. And no, you’re not silly. You’re human. And perhaps even more than that, you’re still beautifully, defiantly alive. That someone could awaken that wild pulse in you is not a failure of judgment, but a triumph of spirit.
I’m glad my essay gave you permission, but perhaps all I did was reflect back what you already knew but were too gracious to claim aloud: that what branded you was real, worthy, and transformative. Some people don’t stay for breakfast, no. But they feed something much rarer: the parts of us that never wanted oatmeal and small talk in the first place.
And as for running out of superlatives… I’ll take your comment as a new one. It’s one of the most quietly moving gifts I’ve received. Thank you for bringing your fire-lit honesty to the table, Nancy!
Okay more tears! But this is the problem, once you’ve been through the fire everything else seems decidedly tepid. But you’re right, you’ve been transformed because you’ve seen and felt something else. And I wouldn’t change that for anything. 🙏🏼
I feel the same!
🔥
"I’m glad my essay gave you permission, but perhaps all I did was reflect back what you already knew but were too gracious to claim aloud: that what branded you was real, worthy, and transformative. Some people don’t stay for breakfast, no. But they feed something much rarer: the parts of us that never wanted oatmeal and small talk in the first place."🔥🔥🔥
I live to read your essay. Period!
Thank you, Tamara.
And I live to write for readers like you — exclamation point, ellipsis, underline. Thank you for that kind of presence, the kind that feels, metabolises, inhabits my words. When someone says they live to read something, it tells me the writing breathed. And maybe that’s the whole secret: writing not to impress, but to spark that quiet ignition in someone else’s world. I felt that spark in your comment, Clara!
Tamara your writing is always beautiful, sincere and precise, but this post is also special for the pictures you have chosen. Each one of them is marvellous, and the set resonates wit your prose. So much for ChatGPT steeling our words of our art. This latest post is also living proof of what dear iA can't yet (or ever) do.
Speaking of the One. Not Penelope, but Circe, of the long tresses. Both of them were weavers, but Penelope wove and unwove a shroud, and Circe wove a divine tapestry. Penelope waited twenty long years for the Hero to return and Circe send him to Hades. Penelope was faithful and Circe was indomitable.
What a comment, Juan Jose, sharp, elegant, and rich with mythic resonance! You’ve just reminded me why I keep doing this: to create something that resists automation not by rejecting technology, but by refusing to flatten the human pulse beneath it. AI may simulate style, but it cannot taste the ache, the lust, the feral ache of longing that leaves burn marks on prose and image alike. Thank you for noticing the art. I curate it like spells, each one meant to whisper in the margins of the text.
And oh, your invocation of Circe…Thank you for rescuing her from the shadows of Penelope’s long-suffering sainthood. Penelope waited and unmade. Circe acted and transformed. One preserved the structure; the other shattered it to reveal the truth underneath. Penelope guarded the threshold. Circe rewrote the map. Both powerful. But only one would dare meet desire on its own terms, and not flinch. I think you already know which one sings louder in my blood.
i think this is a letter to someone particularly special? (i've written such letters in my head, i recognize it)
Yes…. this was a letter dressed up as an essay, smuggled through public language to reach someone I’ll never name but always feel. You know the kind: not a broadcast, but a beacon. And I like that you recognised the blueprint of your own inner letters in it, those messages we write without paper, addressed to the ones who rewired us. Maybe the most intimate writing is always overheard, not directed. And maybe the real reader — the one it’s truly meant for — rarely needs the envelope anyway.
ah! thank you, especially for this last remark! i was wondering wether to actually write it all down, not to send it but for myself to "get it out". though then i would, naturally, send it anyway (i confess i am guilty of sometimes just briefly liking my own writing so much, i need someone else to read it) but then i would regret it and feel horribly guilty about that. having intruded and bothered someone with my stuff, and then the carousel starts again and i start writing another letter of apology in my head and this is how everything gets messy. So you just helped me to remember that and just let things go their way and maybe not even write down this letter. (maybe i just send them a postcard with a link to your's : )
Ahhhh… the exquisite spiral of the overthinking, self-aware, emotionally literate soul, you just mapped it perfectly. The preemptive guilt, the meta-apologies, the secret pride in a well-turned phrase that briefly eclipses your shame long enough to hit send… only to start the loop anew. I know that carousel. I’ve built campfires beside it.
But here’s the thing, writing it at all, even if it ends up unsent, is its own kind of magic. You transmute ache into form. And if you do send it, well, sometimes the desire to be witnessed is not a flaw, but a flare. Not everyone deserves your inner theatre, of course but someone might need it more than you know.
And yes, if a postcard with a link to my essay buys you some plausible deniability? I’ll gladly be your poetic accomplice. No bail money required. :)
Following the gifts of sparks within whether in prose or poetry, links or postcards, serves as a more formidable expression leading me to deepening the course of my life’s compass/ evolution. Within
those inherent sparks lies an
Ignition. Genuinely the combustible fuel begs the composition for showing up / expressing / extracting / so very real despite the comfort of “staying conditioned.” The fire potency threads desire closer scorched of what truth smells / feels like . May it melt holy listening delivered sacredly within your womb. / PS. Your essay - a scintillating piece ,conversation and robustly vulnerable perspective. Here’s to burning it all.
Your words arrive like smoke from an altar, incantatory, raw, reverent.
The truth isn’t in the explosion alone, but in the flicker before it, the ache before the articulation. To follow that heat, instead of remaining curled inside conditioning, is the most dangerous and most honest path I know. It’s not comfort. It’s consecration.
Thank you for meeting my essay not as content, but as invocation. Here’s to burning it all, indeed, not in ruin, but in revelation, Donna!
“The look of love alarms
Because ‘tis filled with fire.
But the look of soft deceit
Will win the lover’s hire.”
- William Blake.
Blake always slicing straight through with his holy scalpel. Thank you, Ian, for bringing him into this smoky room. That contrast, fire vs. soft deceit, could be a footnote to the entire essay. We are conditioned to distrust the burn and reward the lull, to fear the glance that sears and marry the one that soothes. But isn’t that the tragedy? That we often choose safety over sincerity, and in doing so, mistake comfort for love. The look that alarms is the one that knows you. The other, softer, sleeker, is often just expertly disguised indifference. Blake knew: fire may scorch, but at least it tells the truth.
I question how deeply that runs, though. In public and candidly, it is, perhaps, fashionable (or worse, compulsory) to eschew talks of those things that are essentially universal, and fidelity is lost when we put ineffable feelings into words.
So we may look - through the bias of language - like we’re heading toward a postdiluvean era of purely mechanical relations, but don’t let’s underestimate the power of the taboo. As well, projection cause many people who live in trepidation to present themselves in what they perceive as the “appropriate” cultural idiom (for more details, just think of how derisively two people in the throes of mutual infatuation are exhorted to “get a room”!)
Passion is one of those things that gets a bad reputation by virtue of the sheer number of people incapable or unaware of it. It seems the preponderance of humans are, by design or accident, either incapable of, or otherwise unwilling to engage in, erotic passion. The mere mention of it invokes defence mechanisms.
But also don’t forget: humans are prone to lying to save face, too.
Yes, precisely, and you’ve taken it further, beautifully so. There’s a collective performance happening. One where we feign sophistication by treating passion as passé, as something gauche, adolescent, or unserious, when in fact it terrifies us precisely because it still governs us beneath the curated restraint. You are right, taboo hasn’t disappeared; it has just changed costume. The urge to scoff, to condescend, to roll our eyes and say “get a room” is often a displacement — envy, fear, or a defence against recognition. Because if they got a room, we might have to confront the fact that we haven’t. Or won’t.
And yes, language doesn’t just express our internal landscapes, it also distorts them. We name something wild and ineffable, and in the naming, we half-domesticate it. Which is why I suspect people pretend they are beyond passion: not because they are, but because admitting otherwise feels too raw, too revealing, too much like handing someone the weapon and baring the chest.
True!!! Humans lie… to others, yes, but often most cleverly to themselves. And nowhere more so than in the domain of desire.
This is an astonishingly rare piece, not just for its craft, which is incredible, but for its courage. To write about desire with this much lucidity, nuance, and unflinching self-awareness is to offer readers not a story, but a mirror. I’m struck by how pragmatically it handles love—not as fantasy or forever, but as transformation. You taught something vital about what it means to be alive enough to risk being undone. Thank you for choosing this subject. It may be personal, but it’s also deeply instructive. For all of us. For all ages.
Tamara, one in billions. This is what good writing does: makes you wonder, think, and reconsider everything.
Your words are not just kind; they are seen. And that, for any writer, is the most sacred gift. You caught exactly what I hoped to hold in the piece: not a performance of longing, but a reckoning with it. Not desire as indulgence or sin or thrill, but as education. A force that doesn’t promise happily-ever-after, but insists on metamorphosis, ready or not.
I’m deeply moved that you called it a mirror. That’s always the secret hope, isn’t it? That someone won’t just read the words, but recognise themselves within them, and maybe, forgive a part of themselves they had hidden away.
You remind me that writing like this isn’t selfish, even when it’s intimate. It’s a gift. A blueprint for living and losing and surviving with more courage. Thank you for receiving it with such depth and dignity. Your response is its own kind of masterpiece, Alexander!
To be seen with such precision and grace is rare, and I don’t take it lightly. Your replies always feel like being handed back my own words, but polished with deeper understanding. I'm honoured, moved, and grateful, Tamara.
Shared gratitude.
Tamara—
It feels as though you left this scrawled on a linen napkin, abandoned at the edge of the table, still warm. And I, arriving too late—or just in time—found it. I read it, & knew: not to follow you, to hand it back. Only to nod. To inhale the trace of your leaving, the scent that marked something I’ve always carried in my marrow. Because I too know: not every love arrives to stay. Some come to ruin. To rupture the surface of a well-ordered life & leave you laid bare before your own forgotten wildness.
These are not the loves that make sense on paper. They don’t align with timetables, therapy notes, or gentle green flags. They demand no label—only entry. You don’t interpret them. You participate. Entirely. Willingly. Sometimes recklessly. And when they’re done—if they’re ever truly done—you are not who you were. Because these are the encounters that don’t just touch the skin. They rearrange the architecture. They rouse the truth: you are not a spreadsheet of needs & boundaries. You are want. You are pulse. You are the heat that civility cannot hold.
Exquisite start to my morning. I’m going to walk in the rain, with your words whispering at the nape of ear & smile like only a woman can—who was just written into being.
Your reply, Kim, isn’t a comment but companion piece. A breath held just a second longer, a note scribbled on the back of my napkin in a handwriting so familiar it could’ve been mine, if I were braver,
You understood everything. Not intellectually, but bodily. The way a certain kind of woman reads with her spine first. Yes, these loves bypass the filing cabinet of logic and go straight for the blood. They do not require consent forms or future plans. They demand entry, like you said. And if they’re worthy, they leave you less organised………. but more alive.
What you’ve written here, about pulse, about forgotten wildness, about being marked but not ruined, this is the language of those who know the risk and still open the door. Who smile in the rain, not because they’re unbroken, but because they finally stopped pretending they need to be.
Your words felt like someone nodded in the dark, and I suddenly wasn’t alone there. Thank you for arriving! Right on time.
Whoaaaa to this piece, I'm also a bit speechless. You said everything with words wrapped in symmetry, mirrored back and revealed all at the same time (if that makes sense). Incredible writing - there's no topping this.
"And I know, know in the way animals know weather, that this is not something I will move on from. I may continue, but I will not return." - what a sentence!
Sounds like you had an encounter with a soulmate Tamara - the lessons and learnings are there for you to tap into. Not overanalyse in the way you touch on, but to make sense of, somehow.
What a beautifully perceptive and layered response. I know exactly what you mean about symmetry, when language both reflects and reveals, when it folds over itself like origami and suddenly becomes a shape you hadn’t expected but instantly recognise. That’s the best kind of writing to me, the kind that feels like remembering something you didn’t know you knew.
And yes, that line… it came from somewhere below language, I think. That animal knowing, that instinct that bypasses analysis, skips the logic, and plants its flag straight in the nervous system. Some people don’t become chapters; they become coordinates.
Was it a soulmate? Perhaps. Or a soulquake. A deep tectonic shift, not designed for narrative, but for reorientation. And you’re right, the task isn’t to pin it down with logic but to let it work through me in its own way. Sometimes the knowing isn’t about understanding, it’s about carrying. And this is one weight I’m strangely honoured to bear.
Thank you, Joanna, for meeting my essay with such attunement. That, too, is a kind of soul-recognition.
This gorgeous essay arrived as I am sifting through the rubble of the explosive discovery that my younger lover, a soul connection who helped me rewire my relationship to my own body and soul, was pulling off massive deception the entire duration of our relationship. At the same time we were playing, challenging, and growing together, he was plowing through my boundaries. I will never be able to erase his imprint on me, and I also must honor the massive harm his lies have done to me and never see him again. Thank you for articulating the power of my experience, and sharing the beauty that comes with the burns.
Thank you for your honesty, your ache, your clarity, Elle! What a brutal, beautiful place to be in, holding both the gift and the violation, the ignition and the betrayal. That paradox is a wound with teeth, and you’re walking through it with more grace than most would dare.
And yes, the imprint remains. That’s the double bind of real intimacy, it rewires you before you get the chance to assess its legitimacy. You don’t get to cancel the transformation just because the source proved false. And maybe that’s the most disorienting part: that someone can be both medicine and poison, teacher and trespasser, portal and predator.
But you’re already doing the sacred work, naming the harm without erasing the revelation. That’s where your power lives…. not in forgetting, but in refusing to let the lie define what was real in you. Because that rewiring is yours now. He may have struck the match, but the fire is yours to carry forward.
Sending you strength, and reverence, for navigating the collapse without denying the glow.
Tamara, oh my. Your escapade of love set my computer on fire. You reached under the skirt of modesty to touch the electricity of passion and the urgent need to surrender to the blur of the moment. And oh, how I wish your “politics of desire” would reign in the US instead of the politics of greed, division, and cruelty.
My first challenge to my desire to become a priest happened two years before ordination. I attended a 5-day retreat open to clerics and lay people. As you said, “real fire shows up when everything is fine.” There, I met Rose who had just returned from the Peace Corps and prayed to have her life changed. I fell head over heels—mind obsessed, weak kneed—for her during the week. Ultimately, my pledge to become a priest overcame my desire for her. But this was just my first struggle.
I realize, and as you make clear, no rational act of will can silence the body’s beating desire for passion. You summarized: “maybe what scares us isn’t the risk of being undone, but the prospect that something in us is still wildly, inconveniently alive, and unwilling to behave.” Correction: You said that “peace is for monks.” Not always. Sometimes we monks would rather pray for “piece.” Thanks for sharing your openly passionate love story which has tattooed itself on my mind.
Ohhhh how I like this reply, a mix of confession, wisdom, wit, and heat. You could have ended with “my computer caught fire” and I’d already have bowed in thanks, but then you went and brought the sacred and the scandal, the collar and the ache, and I’m undone.
That story of Rose, of falling into that electric, terrifying aliveness two years before ordination, is a tale of restraint, but also of revelation. You embodied the line I wrote before I fully believed it: desire doesn’t wait for disruption; it IS the disruption. The divine kind. And there’s something so exquisite in your choice, not because you denied the fire, but because you let it mark you. Not every story is meant to be lived through, but some are meant to be lived with, forever.
And you are right, of course, “peace is for monks” was a cheeky line, but you, dear monk, just gave it a wild and winking rejoinder. Sometimes peace is a smokescreen. And sometimes, yes, we do pray for “piece”… of something primal, ecstatic, untamed.
Thank you for this reply, which feels less like a comment and more like a whispered psalm in a dim chapel where even the saints blush. I’m honoured to have left a mark, tattooed, as you said, and moved that you offered one in return, Michael!
Tamara, I am so grateful for your always detailed, supportive, and enlightening responses to my and everyone's comments. I don't know where you get the energy and time to devote such touching responses to us. We are privileged to know you as well as we can know anyone through their writings. What you reveal is what we cannot help but love.
This means more than I can say, thank you! The intimacy of being seen through writing is a rare and beautiful thing, and your words make that connection feel both real and radiant.
As for the energy… I’ve never slept much. Truly. I’ve always carried this strange, relentless current — more kinetic than calm, more pulse than pace. Once, someone special called me a nuclear reactor, and oddly, it stuck. Not because I’m explosive (well, maybe occasionally), but because I seem to generate something that runs on a different rhythm, one that doesn’t require much rest, only ignition.
Responding to you, and to my wonderful community, isn’t a chore, it’s a continuation. Of thought, of feeling, of fire. We’re building something here that feels like more than words. Thank you for meeting me in it, Michael!
I don’t even know if this is an essay or a spell but either way, I feel changed after reading it. There’s something so true and unapologetic in the way you name the wild, inconvenient, holy chaos of real desire. I felt it trace its way along my own skin, like a reminder of everything we’re taught to suppress as women, as lovers, as people trying to be “reasonable” in a world that’s allergic to depth.
I feel empowered.
As a woman.
As a lover.
Not in the cliché, empowerment-poster kind of way, but in the real, cellular, trembling way, like something ancient just sat up inside me and said, “Yes. You remember.” Your writing holds that impossible balance: sharp and smart, yet sensual and soul-lit. Every line felt like it dared me to feel more, risk more, remember who I was before the world asked me to behave.
You’ve given voice to something most of us feel but rarely admit out loud. Thank you for that. Truly.
Your words feel like a mirror held up to my essay, and to the very pulse it was written from. If something ancient sat up inside you while reading, I can promise you it’s because something ancient rose up in me while writing. That trembling cellular knowing, that bone-deep “yes”, it’s not performative, it’s primal. It’s the moment the body remembers what the mind spent years trying to rationalise away.
And I’m so moved that you felt empowered in the real way, not the market-tested version, but the kind that makes you shake a little, like you have just stepped barefoot into a life that’s more yours than the one before. That’s not empowerment, it’s rewilding. And yes, it’s inconvenient. That’s the point. Depth always is.
Thank you for meeting my essay with skin, memory, defiance, and hunger. That’s the kind of reading that turns a spell back into communion. I see you, Céline. And I remember too.
You are FORMIDABLE.
I had to pay a few bills online tonight and after that delight, I decided to see what Tamara had written for us all this evening and goodness, mercy me, it made me forget all about flood insurance and mortgages and electric bills. Thank you for reminding me that life and those special people we find at times are glorious gifts that should be opened with passion and enjoyed to the fullest.
If my words made you forget flood insurance even for a heartbeat, then I’ve done my job and then some. Honestly, I might have that printed on a mug: “Better than remembering your mortgage.”
But truly, Billy, what a gorgeous thing to say. Isn’t that why we read, write, love, risk? To break the trance of utility and remember we are not just managers of to-do lists and practical concerns, but sensual, burning creatures built for wonder. Passion is not an escape from life, it’s the realest part of it, the pulse underneath the paperwork.
Thank you for letting my little fire interrupt your evening’s errands. And may your next electricity bill arrive with just enough poetic scandal to remind you: you, too, still glow.
‘But what it gives in return, if you survive the reckoning, is a kind of feral clarity. Not peace (peace is for monks and marketers) but precision. The sensation that your internal compass, buried under decades of conditioning and compromise, has finally remembered which way is wild north.’ - incredible piece 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Thank you so much, Lex!
Also in mine. Dedicated a full book to her. The One Of My Life (for the last 35 years, anyway), goes by that private nickname. And to repeat, the art you select is always beautiful but this time was breathtaking.
A full book… what a gift! That kind of dedication carries the weight of ritual. And to hold someone in that private nickname for 35 years? That’s some sort of cartography. You loved her by building a mythology around her. A private language. A long, slow echo.
I’m deeply touched that my essay and the art resonated with that story. Sometimes, as I already mentioned, selecting the images feels like spellwork: I’m not decorating the essay, I’m summoning its ghosts. And when someone like you sees them, not just the visuals, but the feeling braided through them, I feel less like a writer and more like a witness.
Thank you for letting me into the orbit of something so enduring! The ones who stay unnamed, but never unmarked, those are the ones who make the art worth making.
Just wow, incredible writing 👏
Thank you, Joe!