Imagine [Earth] is your biological mother – because, in a very real sense, she is. Imagine the Sun is your biological father – because, in equally real, life giving ways, he is. Imagine that after the spirit of God touched them, your distant but brilliant father and 70-million-square-mile mother not only fell in love, but began making love: imagine Ocean and Sun in coitus for eternity – because they are. Imagine your ocean mother’s wombs are countless, that her fecundity is infinitely varied, and that her endless slow lovemaking with Sun brings about countless gestations and births and an infinity of beings: great blue whales and great white sharks; endless living birds; gigantic typhoons; weather patterns the size of continents – because it does.
– David James Duncan, My Story as Told by Water.
Susan i find this an horrendous piece of writing. I can imagine few things worse than such a scenario – given that most heterosexual relationships on the planet are dysfunctional, and experienced that way for so many women in particular. In this romanticised version it is the Sun (He) that falls in love with Earth (Her) and it says nothing about whether She is in love with him … no doubt it is not supposed to matter; that is, She will go along with his desire as a good woman does and should. And then it all happens because God touched them; and again even though God touches “them”, it is Sun that”falls in love”, and Earth that receives *his* desire – that is her role when God touches them indeed. This is something that God religions do: *he* is ever agent, *she* is ever to be acted upon, *her* desire dangerous and not to be evoked.
For the same reason, I find such popular stories as “The Phantom of the Opera” deeply disturbing – another romanticised rape story.
I do prefer to think of Sun as Mother, Earth as Daughter, the supernova who birthed our Sun as Grandmother. Creativity proceeded long before there was meiotic sex. And in our times we humans have mostly forgotten what reciprocal pleasure and agency looks like. Riane Eisler’s book “Sacred Pleasure” comes to mind as one hopeful conjuring of mutually enhancing relationship.
Susan, me again: I just realised upon closer reading that it does say she fell in love … hehe I guess I was still pewking anyway at the very idea of it all. “Ocean and Sun in coitus for eternity” … ugh! how many women would care for that? a mostly male fantasy to be sure, and at the heart of so much trouble on the planet.