THAT DAY

I read Speaking Dreams by Severna Park, a pioneering queer love story. After a chapter, I suspect I read this decades ago--or at least started it and quit.

No wonder I quit. A sadistic dystopia! One galactic empire invades, colonizes, and practices plantation slavery; their main rival loudly condemns that, but has their own form of slavery, drugging criminals and using them as individual slaves--even as sex slaves. And the third great interstellar power just eats people. Monsters all.

There is a love story hidden in there. Abused & enslaved Costa dreams repeatedly of a soulmate/rescuer, and wills herself to find her, synchronistically, in a big, corrupt galaxy.

She does, but an awful lot of abuse gets in the way.

Not fun. Or at least, too much pain before the fun.

THAT NIGHT

I'm in a ballet class--mostly girls in their tweens and teens. A lot identify as queer--not surprising for San Francisco.

This school of dance has the rigorous athletic training of classical ballet, but it adds something new: spiritual strength-training. You dance your longing for your ideal lover, and build up magical willpower. Ideally, a spiritual link develops between you and your dance-soulmate, who gets summoned synchronistically by strong enough dancing.

I find the dance-magic very sexy, way more so than mere physical dance. My third eye can even see the Beloved manifesting...

...when it works! But at our student level, success is only intermittent. Focusing's hard, and open longing can bring up all kinds of resistance--guilt, shame, homophobia.

But even these flickering amateurs prove something to me. When they long successfully, they seem sexy! I'm attracted by some physical traits but mostly by energy patterns like these. This class is learning to strengthen desire/attraction itself, as if longing is a muscle. A muscle with a use. To summon a soulmate.

I sense this magical application of willpower--but I just won't practice it. And perhaps I should. These dancers aren't wicked. Why would I be?

AFTERWORD

In Speaking Dreams, Costa did this--even though enslaved, she willed herself to find her dream lover, magically.

Thing is... such dreaming/longing/willing isn't really fantasy. It works. I've summoned lots of little treasures to me--if I've been willing to summon them! But I stop at things; I won't use my will on people (except, a few times in my life, defensively--not willpower but won'tpower).

"With great power comes great responsibility"? At least great reluctance--great restraint.

Yet in my dream, my classmates and our whole tradition see summoning lovers by sheer longing as natural... if needing some practice. And is that wrong?

What if I let myself long as these dancers long?

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