I have been asking people in clinic, "What does your body want?"

This morning I am thinking that I am resigned to being lonely and often sad, though I have times when I feel happy or joy. I don't think we can have the latter without accepting the former. I think to myself, I am ok with being very sad, with grieving, with being alone.

But.... part of me is not ok with it. I think about the elusive small bird of hope that sings in the coal mine of my heart... my body is not ok with being lonely or alone. It is not resigned. My brain and heart can be as resigned to being alone as they want, but my body refuses. It wants hugs. It wants love. It wants companionship. And it is not ready to give up, even if my brain and emotions have....

My body has a mind of its own. That is what they are saying at the functional medicine conferences, that the entire gut tract is part of both the immune system and the emotional system. That is obvious, by the way, because it's always been obvious that irritable bowel is the body response to both good and bad stress. Like, duh. I think that allopathic medicine has dismissed irritable bowel as unimportant, though the pharmaceutical companies are happy to make drugs for it. It is dismissed because it is more in females than males and the United States culture still treats females like crap.

My son says that Thailand is worse, and is 100 years behind the United States in how they treat women. He could hardly bear it when he was in Trang for 8 months. He was outraged, horrified and hurt.

I am taking a class called the reunion of masculine and feminine. Taught by a man and a woman. A classmate asked us to send her our definitions of masculine and feminine.....

.....I don't have one. I don't. Women can get pregnant and men can't and the anatomy is different but who the hell cares? Why do we identify people by one stupid set of chromosomes? And even as a small child I thought who cares about gays and lesbians? If people are having fun and are both consenting adults, does it matter if it's a man and a woman, two men, three women or whatever? I just have never cared. And I don't want a gender definition because it's limiting. I want to love who I love and I want to do what I want to do: fuck "girls shouldn't do that". Fuck "boys shouldn't do that" too. We are still obsessed with differences instead of taking joy in diversity. Wouldn't it be massively boring if we were all the same? Nature and God love diversity: why don't people?

My body still wants love and my body still has hope. The hawser attached to my belly in my dream is grounded and I float in the ocean of beauty and my body does not give up.