Early Morning Intimacy

A Waking Ritual, or, Once over easy.

For mature eyes only:

Excuse me for straying a bit from my Tango monologue (it comes in at the end) and getting a little more personal.

Early Morning Rituals

The pattern to our early mornings is for the most part set. I rise first, typically before 7:30. There does not seem to be any particular adjustment required for the new day, no passing through liminal space, no slow surfacing to consciousness.  A wave of anxiety or depression that may hit me at some point gets pushed back until later. 

After my morning washup, I go down to make coffee. I put on my dance practice shoes and do 15 minutes of spins and pivots. Then I drink my coffee, check my emails and wait for Patricia to join me. Pretty consistent.

Familiarity works.

It saves me from getting pulled down wormholes of introspection first thing in the morning like, “Will today be worth the effort? Am I up to the tasks at hand?” Instead, I determinedly douse this existential dilemma by jumping into routine and ritual.

My wife and I wake up differently. She eases into the day coercing awareness slowly and delicately out of her cocoon of sleep, gently allowing for the infusion of sight and sound. It is a delicately choreographed dance with precision orchestration.

When Patricia joins me, we commence the morning catchup on such critical matters as, “How did you  sleep?” “Any interesting dreams?” “Is the coffee strong enough?” “Would you like a piece of toast?” and then we get on with our day. 

Mostly. Not always.

Sometimes there are surprises, variances. Sometimes I don’t get up. Or I get up but don’t stay up. I pause. An inner tingling suggests there is some unfinished business left behind that invites extra attention.

I allow myself the luxury of nestling back under the covers and snuggling in next to my wife.  The skin-to-skin arouses an awareness of something infinitely richer than spins and pivots. There is an exchange, a connection, an intimate sharing.

An in between moment.

On even rarer occasions, Patricia may be wakening when I make my move. She may turn my way and then, rather than innocent spooning we embrace in full frontal contact. 

And who knows what that will lead to? Okay, we know.

Is that it then? Is that when things really get intimate? Did we finally mine the moment? 

Is intimacy necessarily sexual? Or at the very least, sensual? Is the skin-to-skin more intimate than a night shared in the same bed or even a cup of coffee around the morning paper? 

I don’t detect a starting or ending point. Maybe when we were younger there was an on-off switch that we bumped into with regularlity. Now the connection seems to be more of a continuum, a flow. 

But if I were to identify a defining quality to our intimate moments, it would be affection and presence: the degree to which we are both sensitive and open to the in-between that we nurture.

Tango and the in-between

In the old days, Tango was one of the ways that we initiated intimacy – with all the fireworks that the dance is purported to ignite. Definitely a switch that we could flick on with regularity. But that ended abruptly with Patricia’s foot surgery.

I was then confronted with the choice of either stopping dancing altogether or envisioning a new sentiment to inspire my practice, a new style of intimate connection. Obviously, it would not be the type of intimacy that Patricia and I had shared on or off the dance floor, or have the same spicy elements. But I did discover some overlap.

What I treasure most about Tango is not the fancy flicks and spins but the in-between moments, the pauses, the sharing of a breath, the listening to another and the sharing of attentiveness.

In the words of Simone Weil, 20 20th-century mystic, the most precious gift we can share with another is attentiveness. It is the purest form of prayer and love. And I may add, intimacy.