(excerpted from the revised and expanded edition of Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia)

All of creation is alive and conscious, and all of creation deserves our burning, churning, yearning love. All of it. Not just the people and creatures and things that we personally find beautiful and helpful and interesting. But everything. All of creation.

If we want to become the gorgeous geniuses we were born to be, if we want to give back as many blessings as we are given, we've got to be in love with every single part of the Goddess's extravagant masterpiece.

So how could we possibly be mere heterosexuals? Why would we ever squeeze ourselves into the narrow constraints of homosexuality or bisexuality?

Even bestiality doesn't go far enough. Nor does the flower boinking of the Essenes, or the sky copulations of the Illuminati, or the ritual fisting of the Mediterranean Sea by the ancient Sapphic cults.

If we want to commune with the world the way the Goddess does, we've got to be Pantheosexuals -- experts in the art of Polymorphous Perverse Omnidirectional Goddess Diddling. Anything less than that is an obscene limitation.

With this in mind, I invite you to perform the ritual of the World Kiss. To do the World Kiss, conjure up your most expansive feelings of tenderness -- like what you might experience when you're infatuated with a lover or when you gaze into the eyes of your newborn baby for the first time -- and then blow kisses to all of creation.

Blow kisses to the oak trees and sparrows and elephants and weeds. Blow kisses to the wind and rain and rocks and machines. Blow kisses to the gardens and jails, the cars and toys, the politicians and saints, the girls and the boys and every gender in between.

And with each World Kiss you bestow, keep uppermost in your emotions a mood of blasphemous reverence and orgiastic compassion.

And remember that it's not enough simply to perform the outer gesture; you've got to have a heart-on in each of your seven chakras.

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The poet Rilke said: "For one human being to love another is the most difficult task, the ultimate, the last test and proof. It's the work for which all other work is mere preparation."

Teilhard de Chardin said: "Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire."

Leo Tolstoy: "Everything I understand, I understand only because I love."

Blaise Pascal: "If you do not love too much, you do not love enough."

Emily Dickinson: "Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself."

And you and I say:
"Because we love, ruby-throated hummingbirds sip from plum flowers and the moon sings its silver fragrance to the swans and volcanoes and fields of wheat.

"Because we love, wild grapevines coil around the roots of the mountain, and mangoes ripen in the smoke of forest fires.

"Because we love, everything alive swims in an eternal river that glides through our dreams all night long."

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I'm blowing World Kisses right now, as I sit in the garden in front of my house and write down these words.

I'm blowing World Kisses to the dirt below me and the hyacinths brushing my elbows.

I'm blowing World Kisses to the persimmon tree sheltering the front door and to the neighbor's calico cat gazing up at a phantom in the branches.

I'm blowing World Kisses to the ants snaking along the cracked sidewalk across the street and to the Anise Swallowtail butterfly perched on the tip of the antenna of my dark green Honda Accord.

My World Kisses fly further, reaching where I can't go right now. I'm blowing World Kisses to you, wherever you are, and to everyone you love and to everyone you hate.

I'm blowing World Kisses to all the convenience store clerks in the world. I'm blowing World Kisses to the Norwegian widower working as a welder on an offshore oil rig near Nigeria, and to the poet playing cards with her nine-year-old granddaughter in the bus station in Quezaltenango, Guatemala, and to the head cook at the Hotel de la Sure in Esch-sur-Sore, Luxembourg.

I'm blowing World Kisses to all the wolverines near Sioux Lookout, Ontario, and all the Chihuahuan Ravens in Nebraska, and all the Komodo dragons on the Indonesian island of Gili Motang.

I'm not afraid of running out of love. The more I give, the more I have to give.

I'm blowing World Kisses to what some people (not me) call inanimate objects: to the Black Hills of South Dakota, and to Picasso's Guernica in the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, and to the rolls of blue Saxony Plush carpet in the Carpeteria store on West Charleston Boulevard in Las Vegas.

I'm blowing World Kisses to all the stone walls in Ireland, and to the tornado outside the city of Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast, and to the 15-year-old backhoe rusting in a junkyard in Montevideo, Uruguay.

I'm blowing World Kisses to the woman who broke my heart, and to the friend who betrayed my trust, and to the rich old white male politicians in Washington who hate everything I stand for.

On you and me and all of everything, I bestow my ripest blessings, and declare that since my atoms and your atoms were ripped asunder at the Big Bang, I have fantasized of our rapturous reunion.


"World Kiss" is brought to you by the ecstatic state of mind that the poet Daniel Ladinsky enjoyed when he said:
One regret, dear world,
that I am determined not to have
when I am lying on my death bed
is that I did not kiss you enough!