Your fingers glance along my side, from peak to valley and back again, exploring new territory. It’s a landscape that was unseen and unvisited for several years, until you came along with your shy inquisitive looks and your delicate touch. You have come over me in the same way that a warm wind sweeps across the land, now gently, now forcefully.

If you believe that the Earth is a living thing, which I do, then you have to wonder if it can feel, really feel, the wind as it moves over its skin; in the same way that I can feel your fingers and your legs and your breasts, as they move over my body, sometimes like a breeze, sometimes like a hurricane.

If the Earth feels the wind, then it must also feel the oceans, as they surge and fall according to their own rhythms … their own, and those of the Moon. It’s strange that such a windless, cold, and arid sphere has such a warm place in our stories and in our dreams. Perhaps that’s because it pours out all its strength and love onto us. Its light, though, is reflected sunlight, that is gathered up and showered on Earth during the dark hours.

The Sun and the Moon are like two lovers, except that each person, the woman and the man, is both the Sun and the Moon. We, you and I, are both the Sun and the Moon: all of the nurturing warmth, all of the glorious light of love that we radiate, is reflected back onto each other, and magnified with each successive reflection, with each new round of day and night.

Sunlight creates shadows, and the light and shadow play across our bodies in concert with each other, illuminating some parts of our geographies while making others shaded and mysterious, rendering our explorations more involved and complex than we expected. Better than we expected, in fact; expectations, like discoveries, being malleable things.

When you are ascending a hill, you have thoughts, ideas, dreams about the vista that will greet you at the top. Sometimes, when you reach the top, what you find there is a countryside spread out before you that is more beautiful, more embracing, more fertile, than you thought possible. So, you move forward, each discovery more revealing and more satisfying than the one before. Then you think, “I don’t need to keep moving restlessly on. I could live here, in this place, very happily, for the rest of my days.”

In that same way, your hills and valleys embrace and comfort me. Your landscape is country enough for me, and the light you cast, the light I reflect back onto you, warms my heart and illuminates the path ahead. I can see that path much better now. If we hold each other closely, it’s just wide enough for the two of us.