I had a rainy birthday, so Jay suggested that we recreate our very first photo shoot, Rainy Day Girl. He let me borrow his 100+ year old coat tails, handed me a frog umbrella, and followed me around our backyard with a camera. Tracing our steps back to the first time we played with a camera together was as refreshing as the misty autumn air. It reminded us both of that electric excitement we felt when we first started dating and collaborating.
It’s been over 25 years since Rainy Day Girl. We’ve accumulated deeply scarring emotional baggage as well as amazing memories of profound connection. I am grateful for all of it. I open myself up for more. At some point during our rainy day frolic in the backyard I got down on a bed of wet autumn leaves on the ground. Sometimes the only way to create beauty is to get dirty.
There were clouds and rain on the forecast but it was sunny on the morning of my birthday. Maybe a little windy, but the sun felt warm on my bare skin. https://t.co/2CZnCaACNNpic.twitter.com/fa595Z0C33
I put on the antlers Jay bought me a few days ago. It made me happy to run around naked in the woods behind our house where many a herd of deer have passed through. I keep a pile of fruit and vegetable scraps at the edge of the wood year round, but winter is when the wild life need it most.
I hiked to the top of this cliff. Jay took my photos from the bottom of the rocky hill.
It was a perfect autumn morning. The wind prickled my skin and the sun soothed it. Pine needles on the bald rocks felt slippery under my bare feet. https://t.co/2CZnCaACNNpic.twitter.com/L69UUNw9Ly
I went down on all fours like a beast, waving my invisible tail side to side. When I descended he covered me with his arms and told me I was beautiful.
It’s gorgeous out! Gonna get some sun time. Have a beautiful Saturday! Here’s some more from the full set of birthday nudes barefoot outdoors pics at https://t.co/urjztDkZYD 💋
We made love tenderly at first, then dirty, like animals. He filled me and filled me and filled me until I oozed delirious and he was spent.
Every year since 1999 I take a nude photo on my birthday. It’s now a 21-year tradition that will not end in 2020. Life goes on and so will I. This year’s birthday nude is coming soon to https://t.co/2CZnCaACNNpic.twitter.com/phlSkfdPwS
I washed up, got dressed, and picked up our kid from school. I slid to the passenger seat to let her drive us home.
“How was your day?” I asked. She paused before she told me she had a weird day of not much happening in her classes, then at study hall her friend messaged to say that his dad died. He wasn’t ill. He just died. My daughter seemed deeply affected by that. It hit her hard to think that any day, without warning or indication, she could lose either one of her parents, too.
I took a proactive role and said that we should go get food for her friend’s family. We got a whole rotisserie chicken, a vegetable side dish, and yellow chrysanthemums. I told my daughter to text her friend to ask if we could come over with some food. He said yes.
By the time we got out of the grocery store, it was pouring really hard. My daughter drove in the rain to her friend’s house. It was a long way to Hope, which is the next town over from ours. She turned into a dirt road and up a hill. At the top of the hill is her friend’s house. His family had moved here from Illinois just a year ago. The car parked outside still has Illinois plates. Who knows what situation they are in now without the father?
My daughter wanted me to come along with her. She is so shy, my kid. We put on our masks and walked up to the house.
Her friend answered the door. He looked tired. His eyes were red and puffy.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, as I handed him the paper bag full of food.
He said, “None of us feel like cooking.”
“We figured,” I said. I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t know what was right anymore. We ran back to the car to get out of the rain.
When we got home, my daughter baked me a birthday cake while Jay and I made dinner. We talked about life and love. We told stories and laughed. Underneath it all was the thought that death comes for us all, sooner or later. The question isn’t when, it’s how.
We all get to pick our poison. Some people choose alcohol, drugs, sugar. Others have an obsession with thinness and beauty. Then there are those whose passion becomes a poison, revolutionaries, workaholics, lovers of all kinds.
Jay always said he wanted a beautiful woman to kill him. She could be me, killing him slowly, one headache, one heartache, at a time. If my life was a painting, I’ve already messed up the canvas, made many mistakes and accumulated regrets for inaction. It’s time to pull together all the loose ends, the painful lessons, the dark memories of my life and transform it into a beautiful work of art.
That night, as I blew out the candles on my birthday cake, I wished for more time to love him the way he wants to be loved as a unique and extraordinary human. I’ve only just begun to learn how.
It doesn’t hurt anymore, though. Good to know I’m not allergic, just feeling stupid and sorry that my fierce little honeybee had to die to teach me a lesson. There is nothing I can do to bring her back, no offering or apology. All I can do is learn from experience. I should not have gone into the middle frames at all. Delicate stuff, making babies. It’s life or death in there. I should have respected their inner chamber. That’s where the magic happens.
One month since my bees moved in and they are a thriving busy hive. I’ve seen a drone, a male whose only job is to fuck the Queen with his endophallus, pop off into her Queen V, then die shortly after. A queen typically gets gangbanged and creampied by up to 20 drones in an afternoon. It’s enough cum for her to lay eggs the rest of her life.
Queen Puabee is productive and beautiful! Her all-female worker bees are attentive and protective. When I went into the two middle frames a small army attacked me. I was wearing a beekeeping veil and jacket, but one of the worker bees stung my thigh right through my skinny Levi’s. I suck at making a smoker so I had no smoke and I don’t want to smoke my bees out anyway, so I walked about twenty feet off and lit my smoker again and surprisingly it worked and I smoked myself out until the bees left me. Then I went back, closed their hive back up, and filled their feeder with simple syrup.
Just two weeks earlier on the 14th day beehive inspection, they weren’t as fiercely protective yet. Get a glimpse of Queen Puabee in this video — she is marked with blue paint on her thorax — and listen to me get all excited about larvae.
I’ve wanted this for so long and now I finally did it. I set up a beehive.
There were about 15,000 bees and Queen jammed in this traveling box for 1,500 miles. Tired and hungry for days, they were in no mood to be shaken and pounded out, even if it was into a more spacious hive where I had over half a gallon of sugar syrup waiting for them.
I couldn’t have done this without you and your support of my projects, so congratulations to you, too. WE STARTED A BEEHIVE!
I will be checking in on the queen in a few days to make sure she is feeling sexy in her new home. I’ve named her Queen Puabee, after the Sumerian Queen Puabi of the First Dynasty of Ur.
I’ve been keeping our two acres lush and inviting to pollinators and other wild creatures for years. I’m confident that there will be plenty of nectar for everybody.
It might still be a long time before I see some honey. This early stage is all about my girls building the combs for Queen Puabee to lay eggs. Once they make honey I’ll have to make sure they have enough to survive over the winter. So much to learn but I’m really excited to do it.
Last summer I had a lovely time over Skype with Padmapani Perez and Rev. Joseph Santos-Lyons, hosts of Agam the Climate Podcast. They posted my interview and reading of my piece Power Couple for their Valentine’s Day episode.
Have a listen on Spotify. We dish about the process of writing my piece in the book, Agam. I talk about the Lilith series and feminism. I share lifestyle changes I’ve made toward lowering my carbon footprint and mothering children who will continue to take care of our planet. I feel a little sheepish now listening to myself talk about Greta Thunberg as if no one has ever heard of her, but this was before she sailed across the Atlantic and became a climate change superstar so ignore my over-explaining who she is and enjoy the rest of the conversation.
The folks at Agam honored me with four tree seedlings for this interview and I couldn’t be more proud of it.
Toward the end of the interview Padma asked what I foresee for the adult industry in the face of climate change and I gave a vague answer about being able to adapt as we always have, which is true. The adult industry has always been an early adopter and on the forefront of trends and tech. But here is a more specific way porn is addressing environmental crises.
Sexecology, a form of environmental activism by porn performance artist Annie Sprinkle and her partner, Elizabeth Stephens, combines education and activism in live performances to get people to care for the earth the way one cares for a lover.
Perhaps you’ve been skinny dipping, had sex in the great outdoors, and fucked yourself with vegetables. I have. I’ve eaten fruit so good they made me moan. I’ve straddled tree trunks and hugged their limbs. Rain and snow, lightning and thunder puts me in a horny mood.
What about you? The natural world is a sensual delight. Tell me about your erotic experience in nature. What do you do to let her know you love her?
