The height of summertime heat is plum season for me. Almost 20 years ago, we planted a plum tree inside a newly built garden deer fence, a gift for my 40th birthday. The plum tree now has come to define not only that space, but also the sweet golden plum meaning of summer. It is now close to a decade that the over-abundance of plums have become my annual ritual of decocting homemade plum brandy. 

The novel coronavirus, aka COVID-19, has been going strong since the beginning of 2020. It’s required a lot of people to sacrifice going out and about, particularly if they are immuno-compromised or are otherwise sensitive to getting the virus. In some parts of the United States, restrictions have been lifted in regards to resuming normal life, but many states are seeing a rise in cases. This means your traditional date night options may be limited.

There is no time like long summer nights to cultivate the uniquely, profoundly human capacity for pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. Our pleasure response transforms our relationship to each other and even to life itself.  Focusing on pleasure not only changes how we see our opportunities for intimate connection but also invites us into a deeper relationship with our erotic soul.

Most people accept breathing as an autonomic process that doesn’t require much thought. It turns out that, although our breath will rise and fall without our direction, adding a little agency and consciousness to our breathing goes a very long way in improving our health.

It has been many years that I have been working on cultivating my own inner stillness. Early on, I was just trying to calm down my overworked central nervous system. Like most of us, I just assumed that it was one of the systems in the body that automatically resets and essentially manages itself. 

Although yesterday’s Supreme Court decision limiting access to birth control is a contemporary issue, it is important to place it into its long historical context to better understand what our current conundrum means. Humans have been seeking, experimenting with, succeeding and failing at contraception literally since the beginning of recorded time.

I have had sex thousands of times with the same man. We have been married for close to four decades. Our sex life has been the blessing that has kept us working through the challenges and that, even now, makes our shared grief digestible. Of all of the skills I have developed over the years of building Good Clean Love, sustaining our sexual life, growing up erotically, and sharing intimacy over the span of decades is why I keep writing these columns.

Reid Mihalko, a Sex and Relationship Educator and known as "America's favorite sex geek", joins Wendy to discuss a letter from a "Me Too" man. They talk about Reid's own Accountability Process, discuss what restorative justice might look like in this context, and whose voices should be centered in this kind of work.