The uses of the erotic

The best thing I’ve read on my training so far is the essay ‘The uses of the erotic’ by the lesbian African American thinker, poet and activist Audre Lorde. When Lorde talks about the erotic, she doesn’t just mean sex, she means the powerful life force that tells us when something is right for us, and the sense of energy we get when we tap into our creative power. Although Lorde addresses her essay to women, I feel like she is speaking to all of us when she describes ‘the kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience’, an energy that empowers us ‘not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe’. A really exciting and inspiring read.