The Virgin's Bedroom

::::wherein I probably make a statement of the obvious---be kind, lol, I likely fell on my head more than once::::

While I was fasting as I prepared for Nekysia and began the mental prep I feel I will need for Samhain this year, I slept a couple nights in my sewing room which is also the guest bedroom at need. I was restless with hunger and didn't want to keep the Minotaur awake all night.

But also, my mind was very busy. I just finished reading a book called "Men and the Goddess" by Tom Absher and am re-reading a book I don't recall well since I last read it in about 2000 after my son ran away: "The Moon & The Virgin" by Nor Hall. Most reading I did in the first couple years after he ran was "escape into my head" stuff, whether fiction or non-fiction. And I mentally misfiled most of it. Thus, the re-read on what I think might have been important.

Absher's book really was written and addressed more to men than to women, but I enjoyed his perspective on the heroic ideals men are presented by literature. Simultaneously, I was watching the first season of the television show "Rescue Me" with Dennis Leary in most need of rescue. It was like watching the point of Absher's book play out in film before me! I don't know if I agree with some of what Absher says...that men only learn through suffering to get in touch with the "feminine" half of themselves. I don't like what that kind of thinking says about human beings OR divine beings. But it is a bit like astrology---tho' I cannot commit to fully believing in it, or running my life by it; sometimes it seems uncannily on target.

Hall's book begins (and I am not far into it) almost where Absher left off---with the new realization of what it is to be feminine and virginal. Of course, she isn't talking intact hymen virgin....but the self-owned sort, the woman who does not submit her life and choices to a male. Absher's book gets to that somewhat at the end; because it is implicit that only when a man is in touch with his own inner feminine that he can stop trying to own the women in his life as possessions.

Lying in my smaller, lower and very pillow nest-like bed in the sewing room, covered in a faux-fur throw that is the mirror image of one I owned last when I was single and very virginal in the way Hall talks about, it suddenly hit me. I often had joked that this room, with Maurice Sendak prints on the wall, and all my favorite things was my "inner child" room. That inner child has grown up and come of age I think. It is not my inner child room any more. It is more like Virginia Woolf's "room of her own" concept now...but it is not a room wherein I write much. My poetry book is there, but the computer only rarely is there. It is a more important room than that.

It is the room where I sleep ALONE. It is the room where I "incubate" as initiates of old did, lying in some healing sanctuary cave, waiting for the healing dream to come. It is the room where I nap if I nap at mid-day. It has a different feeling than the bedroom I share with my husband. There, when he embraces me in our marital bed, even if we are both falling down tired---a flush of arousal comes over me. Sometimes, alas, twenty minutes later when I have physically recovered from the arduous day and when he is asleep. I dare not wake him for he rises so very early and gets so little sleep. But in my other room, in the "virgin's bedroom" he might come tuck me in with kisses and embraces, and I feel a million miles away. My dreams there are more intense and memorable. It is where I await Artemis, Athena, Hekate, and others. It is my virgin's bedroom.