Keep Your Mind Guarded Like a City in Battle

From an ancient Chinese medicine text, "The Yellow Emperor's Canon on Internal Medicine," comes these sage words: "Keep your mind guarded like a city in battle." I fell in love with these words the first time I encountered them.

Since that encounter, I see myself as a guard stationed above the door to the castle. A stranger comes to the door and wants to be let in. I tell him that he can speak his mind, and I will then decide whether to grant him entrance. The stranger, of course, are ideas, beliefs, advice, theories, and opinions. The guard listens to all of them, just like I am free to listen to anything anyone says. I then must do the most important job: decide whether such an idea should take up residence in the castle or if it should be sent on its merry way.

As so often happens in life, there are two messengers at my gate with divergent messages. The one who has been there for decades are all the folks over the years who have been telling me that I am too independent and that men want to feel needed by a woman. My friend Beverly, with whom I confided on such matters, says that any man who sees me in one of my full-body orgasms will run for the hills, thinking that if I can get set off by a good kiss or even the touch of a hand, what need do I have for him! But whether it's low sexual threshold or traveling by myself or not falling all over every man who comes along, it's my independence that is keeping men away. That's been the prevailing sentiment. But yesterday Susie told me that I am needy and that this is keeping men away.

I have looked deeply at both these messages, and I have decided not to let either one of them enter my castle. I am proud of my resourcefulness and independence. I get a great sense of satisfaction when I can figure out how to fix something on my own. Of course, I would love to have a man in my life who would say, "Oh, honey, let me do that for you." Wow, that would be fantastic. But he's not here, and I'm not going to start compromising who I am at this late stage. As Tracy Chapman sang, "All I've got is my soul." Amen to that! True, the vast majority of men may be insecure, as Beverly is always telling me. The vast majority might give me a kiss and send me into a bout of quivering and writhing, and that might scare them. But I'm not interested in that kind of man. I'm interested in the kind of man who would see that and say, "Damn, honey, that's what you do with a kiss! I can't wait to see what happens when we take our clothes off!"