Self Portraits in the Nude

© Copyright 2006 Hannah Blue Heron.

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Contents

DEDICATION

To Emily Carol, who,

after reading some of the first drafts

of That Strange Intimacy,

told me she wanted to know more

about my feelings, as to what was happening.

I took her advice to heart and made changes,

but it seemed to move too fast to do what she had requested.

So now, this third memoir. for you, Emily Carol,

which, in one way, hardly moves at all,

but which, I hope,

you will find very moving.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to the women of the Southern Oregon Women Writers’ Group, Gourmet Eating Society and Chorus, who, not only heard many of the early writings of this book, but in some cases, lived them with me. Also my gratitude to the Desert Women Writers’ Group of Tucson, who gave me suggestions and support as I put these writings together, especially Jeanie Marion, who carefully edited the entire text and my beloved partner, Margaret Moore, who supported me throughout with suggestions and encouragement.

ALSO BY HANNAH BLUE HERON

Image382.JPG That Strange Intimacy

Image389.JPG Growing Tall in Colorado

PREFACE

I had answered their ad in Country Women Magazine, hoping to meet other older women interested in living alternative life styles.

At the time I was very active in the counter culture community (hippy) in Corvallis, Oregon, but I was very lonely. I had come out to myself two years before, but had not met any other lesbians in Corvallis. While the wording of the ad did not reveal that the Older Woman’s Network consisted primarily of lesbians, the writers of the ad, Elizabeth Freeman and Elana Michels, did live together, so I wrote them with great hopes and much trembling.

They answered my letter right away, inviting me to their home in Wolf Creek, Oregon. In the first few minutes of my visit they came out to me and I, to them, the first time for me. What a deep and wonderful release! They were both amazed and warmly welcoming as I unburdened all those years of denial and a couple clandestine affairs.

Through them, I was to meet many other lesbians and feminists and while I have not lived happily ever after, I have been able to live more honestly and with a great peace inside myself.

Several years later, I found myself in their living room in Wolf Creek. By then, they were making the difficult decision to leave Wolf Creek to join Elizabeth’s nephew and his lover in Durham, North Carolina. It was especially hard for Elizabeth to leave this place, where she had intended to live out the rest of her life. She got out some large photo albums, filled with snapshots taken at Older Women’s Network meetings, which we had attended. The pain of leaving her home was alleviated a little as we browsed through the good old times together.

As Elizabeth turned the pages and we reminisced about the women, I was struck by the lovely breasts of one woman in a series of photos, who looked a lot like me. At once, I disclaimed the recognition to myself. My breasts were smaller and flatter, not nearly as nice as those in the pictures. Still, the striped overalls falling about her waist seemed like the ones I was wearing at the time. Her face was remarkably like mine. But the breasts? No! She couldn’t be me!

Elizabeth was entirely unaware of this dialogue I had been having within myself. As she flipped the pages onward, we continued to remember and I remained haunted by what I had seen.

Several days later, I was, again, in Elizabeth’s living room waiting for her to return from Grant’s Pass. I could not resist getting out that particular album in order to examine more closely this woman with the lovely breasts. The face was definitely mine! Could it be that my breasts would look that different when seen from an angle other than down my nose and over my chin? I was tempted to go up to the bedroom, where there was a large mirror, take off my shirt and check it out, but Elizabeth returned home too soon.

At the time, I was living in a small cabin with only a two by three inch mirror, by which to comb my very short hair. However, I bathed weekly in the main house on the land. The bathroom had a medicine chest with a mirror. By backing up as far as I could and leaning back a little more, I could focus in on my upper torso. Tears of joy streamed down my cheeks, as I realized for the first time in my fifty-five years, just what lovely breasts I had. So, my new lover wasn’t just being nice, when she had told me how lovely they were, several months before!

Actually, during my stay at Nourishing Space, where these pictures had been taken, I had marveled at the variety of women’s breasts and had found them all singularly beautiful. I just hadn’t applied that discovery to myself.

I have lived with and near other women for seven years, now, and have come to know myself in many amazing and positive ways. This is true of my inner as well as my outer self. A few of the discoveries have been frightening, because of the intense anger I felt, when I discovered the depths of male oppression I had suffered from all my life. I had never been able to conform to their ideals of womanhood.

Mostly these epiphanies of myself to myself have been positive and healing and it is these I wish to share with you under the title Self-Portraits in the Nude.

PART ONE

LESBIAN LOVE

INTRODUCTION

Just before Valentine’s Day in 1986, my friend Julie Hopp and I went to Eugene, Oregon, so that I could do research on women composers at the University of Oregon library. We went over to the student union for lunch and in the lobby we saw a Valentine’s display, put together by the campus Gay and Lesbian Alliance. At the top of the display it said, It’s not the sex so much as the love. Underneath they had examples, one of which showed a man looking at an umbrella in a closet. He was saying, Oh dear, he forgot his umbrella!

At the beginning of this section is a letter, which I wrote to a friend from my convent days. After revealing to her that I was a lesbian, I elaborated on my concept of lesbian love, which, for me, extends itself to all women, lovers or not. Then comes a journal entry about loving myself. This is followed by some erotic poems, a birthday cycle, playing music with friends, an essay on inspiration, and a poem about contentment and love. The section ends with a novella, which appeared in Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives, Nos. 27 and 28

September 20, 1983

Dear Elaine,

Thank you for your efforts to find me for the reunion with other former Good Shepherd nuns during the summer of 1982. I also felt much joy over your expression of gratitude for the relationship we had as sisters in R.G.S.*

Leaving R.G.S. was a very painful experience for me, because I had come to love many of you from a very deep place. While my love for you was spiritual in the Christian sense of the word, i.e. a-sexual, I realize now that the deepness of it came from my lesbianism, which permits a woman to open herself more to other women in all kinds of woman-to-woman relationships, whether they include sexual expression or not. However, it was the reassertion of my lesbian sexuality that made it necessary for me to leave the Order, to leave all of you.

My heart had been beautifully opened by a woman during my sophomore year in college. Fatefully, she was Catholic. I was not. Shortly after our first experience of the delights of eros, she informed me about mortal sin and that what we had been doing was definitely in that category. I was so in love with her by then, that the celibacy, which she required if the relationship was to continue, was acceptable to me. Then she introduced me to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, on Whom I sublimated my love for her, and you know, somewhat, the results of that. If you want more details on that, perhaps some day you will come across my book, That Strange Intimacy, which tells of my experience as an R.G.S. and twelve years following.

It will be seventeen years ago this October (two days after the feast of St. Teresa of Avila)† that I left you, each and every one of you. I am still learning the meaning of that experience, its pains and releases. Now I realize that spirituality can be deepened by sexual love and so, once again, I can joyfully (gaily) experience the spiritual part of myself and continue to pursue and develop the mystic in me. While mysticism can be celibate (at times I certainly appreciate that fact) it need not be, and a deeply caring sexual love with another can be a highly mystical experience. I no longer acknowledge the jealous love of the Judeo-Christian God. My mysticism is more akin to Zen Buddhism, which has no God as an object, but rather seeks and experiences the oneness in love of the universe and all things and beings in it.

My absorbing thirst for mystical love has led me to live in a very simple way economically. You might say that the vow of poverty is the only one that remained with me. My life now, however, is not without anxieties on this issue , as well as deprivations unknown to us in the convent. I am still working out solutions to this. I do know being a teacher in the public schools or a social worker was too draining and made me more anxious and depressed than the deprivations I now experience.

My mysticism does not exclude the political, and I am working on a musical fantasy, From the Other Side of Madness, in which I present one possible feminist solution to the wearinesses of the world. Thirteen of my friends just helped me to present the first act to an audience of around sixty women at the annual Woman’s Fall Gathering near Ashland, Oregon. The response was satisfying, gratifying and stimulating.

Hannah is Jewish for Anne and was given to me by a beautiful Jewish woman on the first hippie commune where I lived for four months in 1974. Its sounds seem to resonate with me. The stately and graceful blue heron is my totem. If names are to express, somewhat, one’s essence, this is my chosen name, which I have made legal.

Well, Elaine, if there is anything in my life that I have spoken of here that strikes a chord of harmony with yours, or any of the others living in Portland, I will be overjoyed to hear more from you, each of you, any of you.

Love, Hannah

Journal entry: December 30, 1982

Last night I made great love to myself, better than ever before. Afterwards when I fell asleep and then awakened, I would feel Circe’s‡ love for me pouring through my body.

It took me an entire day to appreciate the break through of making great love to myself. It has been five and a half years since I dreamed of Circe and it has been only in the last year that I have permitted myself to recall her presence, to let myself be loved by her. The rest of the time I waited for her to be the initiator. It could have been a lack of faith in her reality, but I think more likely it was feeling that I didn’t deserve such love.

That also has something to do with why I can’t often make love to myself. I feel unworthy. This seems to be proven by the fact that I haven’t had a long term relationship since I came out as a lesbian in January of 1977. I see happy and unhappy couples all around me and I still feel that to be whole, somehow, I need a lover. I am just beginning to realize that I am just using a lover to do something I can’t do for myself. Love me.

But last night I did make a breakthrough. I made love to myself longer than I ever have before, and what a delight! I felt a deep passion for myself which I haven’t felt before, even when achieving orgasm. Sometimes I feel that orgasm has become the goal, even sans love. But last night I loved, I desired, I laughed, I stroked, I had a deep passion for myself. I also experienced a profound joy at being able to love myself so well.

I finally slept and in a few hours awoke feeling Circe’s love pouring through me. The pores of my skin were tingling with it. It was rushing through my veins. My eyes and lips were dilated with it. Such ecstasy! Was she thus asking me to include her in these love-makings? Three times I would sleep and then awaken to her passionate, loving presence.

My First Love

I was two?

two and a half?

three?

She was barren.

Her love for me was, perhaps,

for the daughter she could not have.

I did not see her as mother,

nor as the aunt I called her

Aunt Hahnan for Helen.

No.

At night, alone in bed,

I would seek her out.

My body would become light,

as it bathed in her smile.

I could walk out of myself

into her light?

No.

In the dream

she would permit me

to raise her arm

to lose myself there.

To go into the dark, hairy cave

of her underarm.

Oh, euphoria!

Oh, blessed sleep!

September 28, 1981

Vulva

Vulva…

is the name of a flower.

My favorite.

I see it begin to open

as I gently massage it with my thumbs.

It opens more

as I caress it with my tongue.

My love pulses in you

through my finger tips.

Spring 1977

Root Chakra

Roots… entangled… but

each earnestly… purposefully

seeking out food

for the plant or tree

at the same time giving it stability.

Thoughtfully seeking

slowly imbibing any water in the soil

and the attendant minerals

Nourishing

nurturing

nudging the tree

to growth.

My tongue

earnestly, purposefully

seeks through the entanglements

of your pubic hair

Groping

but at the same time caressing

the sensitive nerve endings

of the labia of your vulva

Seeking

until it finds your hood

staying there for a time

quickening the pace of its dance

to bring out the wetness

your response to the massage

telling me it is time to enter.

And you are moving

as if massaging back.

My tongue and lips

enjoy the flavor

pouring out of you.

I, too, receive nourishment

while nurturing

nudging you.

My tongue enters

as far as it can.

You arch your back

pushing for more

My tongue massages more

goes back to your clitoris

back to your vulva.

Back and forth

back and forth

until you are more than ready

for the entrance of my fingers.

Roots?

Roots in root chakra

dancing roots

your whole body dancing now

and mine, too.

Thus, we dance the hours away.

Summer 1981

Birthday Celebration of 1983

When I moved from Oakland, California to southern Oregon in August of 1980, I was not just wanting to escape from the city and live peacefully in the country. I wanted to leave the energy of the city, which seemed so competitive and, in this way, male. I wanted to find my own creativity and to do this with other women and thus start a new culture, a woman’s culture.

Almost four years and three moves later, I have found the woman’s community here interested in developing a woman’s culture, but we do not live together, as I had thought we would. We meet for five intense hours every third Sunday in a writers’ group. Perhaps if we lived together, we would not be able to reach the same intensity. These hours are so precious to us that some of us travel over a hundred miles to be with each other. It was with many of these women that I shared my fifty-seventh birthday, extending over a five day period.

I had asked Claire and her household if I could spend the day itself, May 6, with them. That day more than fulfilled my expectations. They took me on a tour of their new farm. I saw how the lambs, that I had carried on the day of their move to the farm, had grown far beyond the carrying stage. There were three new goslings and more on the way. The pheasant was blooming out in reds and yellows, as expected and I saw again the tiny quail that had been lost, temporarily, the day of the move. Sherry, the Shetland pony, was munching away in a lush pasture with the sheep and lambs. The women had prepared beds for a large garden, and in between showers of rain, I helped plant some beets and chard.

I had been very disappointed when I heard there would be guests there. In fact, I thought about not going. I didn’t want to be among strangers that day. I might have known that any guests of theirs would not be strangers for long. While dinner preparations were going on, I had a wonderful visit with a woman, who had been the youngest in a Catholic family of eleven children. We shared our pasts of having been Catholic and our joys at not being so any longer.

Then we enjoyed a delicious meal of tabouli, falafel, Claire’s homemade bread