Your Secret Erotic Spiritual Self Beckons. Now What?

We grow up with mixed messages about sex. It doesn’t matter how many lovers we’ve bedded or how many wicked deeds we’ve committed in the pursuit of illuminating sexual awakening. Our secret erotic selves, through their sublime, hushed, hurried, languid, empowered and vulnerable natures, bring us to the edges of humanity’s comfort zones. Those who were raised in religious homes know this Gremlin even better than secularists. That is because the...

Will the Real Lesbian Please Stand Up?

What is it about growing older that frees women to explore fantasies they may never have had envisioned in their younger, heterosexual days? Last year, a good friend told me that for the first time in her life she was sleeping with a woman. As long as I kept her identity a secret, she said I could share her story, and then she smiled as she talked about how much touch and affection she enjoyed from her female lover, also a newbie. Together, they were...

Green Love: 4 Elements of Relationship

We traditionally think of the brain as the command center of our lives, sending messages to the rest of our bodies and controlling our thoughts, behaviors, emotions and desires. Except, it turns out that when it comes to the heart, it’s the other way around. Your heart sends more messages to the brain, then your brain does to your heart. This surprised me, turned my view of what I’d learn about basic brain biology upside and made me think:...

Love is the Healthiest Habit(at) for All

In her NY Times article, writer Jane Brody finds out about the power of love two years after her husband’s death. We can’t begin to know what their 44-year marriage was like, nor does she divulge much, though through her missing him we gather they had built a lifetime of good memories together. Nowadays, it’s easy to mock monogamy, marriage or commitment as pedestrian and oh so 1950s. Avoid the reality at your own peril; love, it turns out, is the...

Spider Magic and Weaving Words

This past week, I saved a baby spider in the shower and was visited late at night by another larger variety when it crawled over my hands as I typed at the computer.  Once upon a time, these eight -legged creatures inspired a disproportionate amount of fear, until I came face to face with creatures as big as my palm, as black as the night sky, and as venomous as death. That’s because life in the hills of the Galilee, Israel – where I lived from...