Seeds and Conception

Conception is an instant when everything changes, when a sperm is accepted by an egg and a woman's body begins to shift gears into pregnancy.  Some women can tell almost immediately, but generally the turning-point passes unnoticed.  Often, people don't even know what sexual encounter was the one that made it happen. 

Or, it's a moment having nothing to do with sperm and eggs, if you can "conceive" of such a thing — it's that moment when the germ of a new idea first begins to coalesce in your mind.  Again, such a moment often passes unnoticed...  only weeks or months later do you understand, as the revelation bursts upon you and you sit bolt upright in the middle of the night or start scribbling madly on a napkin in a restaurant, that something new has been born. 

So one of the key transitions of our lives is secret, happening unnoticed deep within a woman's body, or within a mind, on a mysterious cellular level to which we have no direct access.  What an extraordinary mystery!

Sowing seeds

Agrarian peoples all over the world and across many millenia have recognized that planting seeds in the earth is analogous to the mystery of sowing sperm in a womb.  In the springtime, therefore, with greater or lesser formality, they traditionally practiced ritual sex so as to encourage the seeds to "conceive" and the crops to grow so that no one would starve come winter.  By identifying their own fertility with the fertility of their fields, they linked their sex to their very survival and held it sacred in the deepest way. 

On May Day in England, for example, the maypole dance we used to do as children was performed around an explicitly phallic pole and was traditionally followed by a night of wild sexual revelry. 

It's easy to dismiss that kind of thing as primitive or superstitious, but it has a lot of power.  When you're trying to be more creative and fertile in your life, whether in your relationships, your art, your job or just your attitudes, it makes sense to connect that goal with your sexual energy.  By eroticising it, you deepen both your commitment to your creativity and your celebration of your sexuality.