Yielding

I'm still in ROC, stretching myself over the US thanksgiving weekend, working away in the med school library. Making some progress on my... stuff, my unnameable stuff that might become something.

It's warm, here, climate-change weird warm, the gasp of faint sunlight that comes before winter smothers everything. F and I seized the moment to finally ride together on his bike, the avatar of some of our initial flirtation but which we'd never managed to get out on before.

Before my first date with F, when I was fussing about what to wear, my wry wise 8 y.o. friend Amelia firmly cooed at me, "He has a motorcycle? Oh, you're going to end up with him -- you always end up with the guy with the motorcycle."

Amelia's precognition aside, I always saw the bike as something potentially fun, a key element of some of F's most important narratives about shared dreams and voyages with his ex, a tie to my sister and BIL and their penchant for touring on a BMW. I never really eroticized bikes in the way of most dykes, or had the hankering to ride one of my own that my sister and several other female friends had, but I also never had the same level of horror at the potential risk of them that some of my friends did. I'd ridden with my long lost elfin Chris M and always expected another bike to show up someday. They simply ...were, a possibility, something interesting to someday explore, maybe, if the opportunity presented itself.

So Saturday, F taught me how to properly climb on behind, and we went off through the faintly clammy thin sunshine, stopping to buy me a properly fitting helmet, try on various armoured and waterproof jackets. Began to fantastize about trips of our own. Within about two miles, I knew that I loved it -- could imagine driving a bike of my own -- and even more, loved being behind F.

It's remarkably intimate, this thing of riding behind someone you love. There's an astonishing kind of ... yielding. I implicitly trust F's driving -- I've driven in the car enough with him, and I see what he watches for and sees -- and more than that, there's a flow of handing over control, letting myself lean with the bike, follow F's lead. There's a rush and an awakeness to it, but there's also an incredible peace, an entirely different, wordless dimension of presence. A suspension, like good yoga or the perfect run. The kind of yielding that makes rhythm with someone else, balanced on thighs pressed lightly around hips, F's hand reassuring on my knee when we're stopped at lights. So much movement, no desire or need for words, the sensation of energy lifted out of time, world clear and vivid as it passes, people putting up Christmas lights, trees without leaves, cars moving too ponderously, the lake sparkling like Cockburn's diamonds conjured up by wind and sunlight.

I think one of the things I'm learning in this relationship is how to follow a lead. When we were dancing at B's wedding a couple of months ago, F said with sudden amusement, "you're letting me lead." This is foreign for me. Letting his ideas weave with mine, welding together something new. Picking up and building.

When I last went to Chicago, I went to one of P's classes where she teaches improv as part of creative living and working, unlocking set channels. This was really the first time I'd done anything resembling improv, and at first I was all pleased with myself for being so open and creative in my enactment of the fragmented instructions. And then I realized that while I had interpreted the word "portrait" to refer to painting of some kind, everyone else in my group had seen photography and had some shared meaning. And I was sort of stubbornly clinging to my interpretation as the "right" one -- not noticing and flowing with everyone else's aligned meaning. Not much to build on, then.

A lot of my life and work is about finding my own unique voice, synthesizing other people's perspectives into something new. So many of my relationships have been about me leading, me in control. And with F, I'm learning a kind of yielding that makes a flow, a dance -- not a submissiveness, but a welding together that is about taking someone else's perspective that is different language, different angle than mine, and letting myself look through that lens, refracting both sets of ideas, seeing so much more.

The flow of the bike, the dance that's us, the yield, was counter-pointed last night by a bit of an Incident with F's friend R's girlfriend. R & M have been staying with us through the week. They've had a few bumps of their own, and M's way of coping is to be a bit... strident and polemical. I was in a quiet post-dinner space last night, just pensive and low-key, thinking about my work, calmly present with F, when they came in, full of a lot of energy. M somehow got off onto a tangent about whether Lincoln was gay or not that resulted in a fairly aggressive rant in which she attempted to pin me to the conversational mat with the verbal equivalent of a martial arts war cry at every point. I realized that I no longer have any space for this kind of aggressive form of "debate" -- as I've moved my work into deliberation, discussion, dialogue, I realize that I can only learn by hearing each other's perspectives, not obstreporously trying to refute them through rhetorical superiority.

Last night I was tired and I just sort of melted away and weakly, abruptly, excused myself to go to bed. Pondered the difference between the soft, open, generative yielding of flowing with someone you trust, and the air-sucked-out version of being made to yield to a show of force. Both forms of acceptance, one underbelly exposed and submissive, another expansive and inviting. Energy displaced or generated. Standing stronger, or bent and drained.