A Birthday Wish

For my 53rd birthday last week I gave myself a wish.

Here ‘tis: that all women over 45 experience the luscious delights of their own powerfully pleasured selves. That from this sweet pleasure they blossom into the world, perfuming it with their own delicious generosity and compassion.

I’m adopting the lotus, the flower on my masthead, as my symbol for the year. Besides being sensually gorgeous (and for me, all women are sensually gorgeous), I love the lotus’ cultural history. Buddhists see the lotus as a symbol of the spiritual journey, arising from the mud of this world, blossoming into the exquisiteness of our awakened selves.

I love that the Divine is not set apart from this sweet world: that moving deeply into its delights and challenges awakens us into embodied spirituality.

But wait - here’s my favorite part of sister lotus’ rich history! She goes even further back. Women in ancient Egypt celebrated lotuses and painted them on their frame drums. This elegant flower was for them a symbol of a woman’s genitals, our sumptuous second hearts.

For this birthday gal the lotus is the full flowering, in this sweet and muddied world, of our gorgeous feminine selves. I’m thinking--from my own personal experience and from 25 years of coaching and counseling women--that this flowering takes about a half-century to happen (there can be an awful lot of mud to move up through)...

So here we are in our post-50 glory, blossoming forth from the muck of what has gone before, the fertile muck of our pre-menopausal lives.

We can offer the love, pleasure, and glory of our lotus-selves to the world.

So this is my 53rd birthday wish for myself, and for all your pleasuristas as well. I vow, con gusto, to do all I can in a deeply pleasured way to help this dream come true.