The Mystical Pleasures of Chocolate: Meditations

By Ronn Edmundson

Since I have been a lover and student of chocolate since birth, I have looked at the seductive, high gloss covers for books dedicated to the use of chocolate for desserts. What has drawn me to those books has been the eye arresting graphic designs, lettering and rich, provocative dark and milk chocolate jackets. Since my book explores the metaphoric and symbolic quality of chocolate women, then the analogy works perfectly on multiple levels of meaning. For example, according to chocolate connoisseurs, chocolate was the food of the mythic gods of the Mayans and Aztecs. Moreover, the sun played a dynamic role in the germination of this plant that eventually became the rage of Europe and then America. Like chocolate, chocolate women come in a spectrum of flavors, colors, textures, sounds and scents. Moreover, gentlemen who have made it their life's work to know the spectrum of chocolate tend to become chocolate connoisseurs. Hence my meditations celebrate the spectrum of chocolate women who are works of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 14, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469760353

Ronn Edmundson

Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ronn Edmundson attended Booker T. Washington High School. A football scholarship and later academic scholarships allowed his matriculation at Bishop College, the Claremont Colleges, the University of Michigan and Brown University. He has worked as a newspaper reporter, a public relations director and a university instructor. He currently teaches creative writing in Southern California.

Book preview

BATH TUB ADVENTURES

I can still see myself at my grandparents’ home on a sunny afternoon. I’m two years old sitting upright in their old fashion, white bathtub on raised legs. I’m splashing water and soapsuds while five neighborhood teenage girls give me a bath. Amid the sunlight, the water and the soap bubbles, I hear my own and their laughter. The entire bathroom is flushed with human warmth and radiance. It is as though on their shoulders and mine abide the sun in unconditional splendor. The radiance of their faces energizes my own and my face energizes theirs. Our bliss, innocent as the spring, transforms an ordinary ritual into a celebration. The moisture, the heat, the black skin glistening and the sweet smell of the scene fill my senses even as I reminisce.

I see her facing me in one of those modern bathtubs. Close cut, kinky curly hair, mocha skin, breast like red, delicious apples; nipples like raisins; full lips and almond eyes; small waist, firm stomach; full thighs and hips; painted toe nails on beautiful feet; ample lustrous pubic hair black and curly; inspirational.

Now I soap her body, rinse and repeat meditatively. I part her legs and wash her pubic hair, the lips of her vagina, her canal; consciously, I gently push back the foreskin revealing her clitoris and slowly wash, soap and rinse while she watches me explore her sacredness.

In the silence, in the stillness that permeates her apartment surrounded by Rhode Island snow, I listen to our breathing and the undulating rise and fall of her breast and my chest. The candlelight flickers on the walls casting our shadows in stark relief. I look into her eyes and I see the sun in a pristine sky and feel a soft breeze amid shifting sands and swaying palm trees.

As she looks intently into my eyes, she now soaps me, washes me, rinses me, explores me. My arm pits, my chest, my stomach, my face, my ears, my hair, my legs, my feet, my hips, my pubic hair, my testicles and my penis. In her gentle hands, it alternates from firmness to softness. We steep ourselves in one another’s eyes. She wraps her legs around my waist and plants herself in me. In this posture, we sit still and silent. Bodies and thoughts fall away as the sun rises to its zenith.

I’m in another bathtub. This time in California. In the dormitory counselor’s abode on a college campus in the early summer. At night. An interlude between spring and fall semesters. Divinity is on the phone and I’m running bath water. I have purchased bath oils, organic soap and sandalwood incense. A special shampoo, large terry cloth towels and robes to wrap us in after the bath.

The phone is placed back on the receiver as I enter a huge mountain of snow-white bubbles. A few moments pass and Divinity steps slowly in and momentarily rests her eyes on mine. Slowly she immerses herself in the white bubbles. Like a snow-white blanket, she spreads it over her back, hips, thighs, calves, ankles and toes. She faces me. Resting her breast on my chest, she breathes a deep sigh of relief as her body goes completely limp.

We look like two milk chocolate candy bars surrounded by vanilla ice cream and whip cream. Full of one another’s senses, one another’s breathing, we soak up the silence, the stillness that refreshes and purifies our souls.

Slowly brushing against me, pressing her navel into mine, she sends electricity to me. With her hands firmly planted on my shoulders, Divinity straddles my thighs. Instinctively she positions her vagina over my penis and slides down the shaft like a diamond ring to a waiting finger. With my left foot, I turn the tub’s knob to increase the water’s temperature and multiply the bubbles. With my right foot, I turn off the water. Sweat begins to pore out of us.

Aside from the water’s undulations, there is no movement from us. Still seated and steeped in each other, Divinity commences to alternately tighten and relax her vaginal muscles, which causes me to alternate between softness and firmness. All the while her fingers explore the sweat beads on my chest. I study her skin texture, her eyes, her ear lobs. In my imagination, I see visions.

I hear voices from an oval shaped grandstand. Voices are cheering the thoroughbreds on to victory. It’s as though Divinity becomes this completely naked milk chocolate jockey riding this dark chocolate stallion ahead of all the others toward a golden finish line.

The white bathtub and soap bubbles become so many white fans shading happy faces in the summer’s sun. As her thighs rise up to my waist all the while continuing the contractions, I seem to change from human to horse. At times, I seem to be a woman with a woman’s genitals that play every instrument, every string, and every note in my orchestra. At times, I become a man again like a pyramid around which stars, moon, sun, winds, rain and sands whirl about in perfect harmony.

Like the sun, whether human or horse, whether man or woman, we ascend from the earth’s embrace to the heavens. Above the fans, the hats, the faces, the racetrack that become a bathtub, a bubble bath, a man and a woman savor love’s body in the summer night.

THE MYSTICAL WOMEN IN MY LIFE

When I cerebrally remember the spectrum of chocolate women in my evolving conscious being, I am not at all surprised that I was always immersed in their collective presence. I was always in quiet awe of their several powers to hold my eye and ignite my curiosity to know the landscape of their dark symphony. Their presence gave birth to the sun daily in my chocolate being.

To nurture that luminous being within me, those chocolate women whose faces and names I can no longer remember use to escort my elementary classmates and I to a Baptist church a few blocks from our school. Hand in hand my classmates and I would walk to that black institution to be immersed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In retrospect, those chocolate women were in charge of our several souls in both the secular and spiritual worlds. In a metaphorical sense, I suppose like Thetis, goddess mother of Achilles, we were being collectively dipped in a river of amulets, of signs, of images, of symbols that would in theory protect us as we made our separate ways through the worlds that laid before our eyes. We were being tattooed with ideas we could neither comprehend nor clearly appreciate at the time.

So, I suppose in the years to come as we made our way through worlds not of our own making, we would at least have a social and cultural frame of reference that would help us make sense of where we were, why we were and who we were on the path to immortality.

In retrospect I suppose my elementary, middle and senior high schools constituted my introduction to a world of educated chocolate women. Of course there were chocolate men in these institutions, but it seems to me these women out numbered them seven to one. These women taught me language, arithmetic, music, speech and art. They inadvertently taught me how a woman should carry herself in public. Indirectly, perhaps they demonstrated through their several professions how I should look at a cerebral woman; that is to say, though her being might arrest mine eyes and stimulate my young mind to venture beyond her public persona, I should mainly appreciate the wealth of experience, wisdom and knowledge she incarnated.

If I failed to appreciate her cerebral treasures, I would in effect have missed the better part of her being. To miss that dimension would have also caused me to dismiss or devalue my own cerebral gifts. If I had pursued that logic, what would I have gained when my body was consumed with old age and death waiting in the wings? Would I still have nutritional provisions to see me to the far, mystical shore where mortality cannot tread?

As I remember my first teachers arrayed in their professional clothes, I suppose, given the conservative nature of their attire, often the only indication that these chocolate Sundays were indeed mortals was a glimpse of their ankles and calves in high heels. Perhaps my slowly awakening curiosity to know the mystery of these well-dressed goddesses of the fine arts commenced at Marian Anderson Junior High School.

I am not at all sure of the exact moment when the dark clouds of my mind’s eye commenced to roll away and the mystical sun of my being, the mystical eye awakened from the innocent dreams of childhood. I am not at all sure when the first surge of my chocolate covered testosterone arose and flowed through the fibers of my conscious being. I am not at all sure when mine eyes commence to actually look at a chocolate woman well heeled in this cerebral world of learning.

Ever a curious child, I wanted to see through their personas and know the dark symphony of their natural landscapes. Why? I really do not know. I had never seen a full-grown chocolate woman naked and I knew not the dimension, the complexity or scope of her sexuality. Of course, I suppose I intuitively knew that her sexuality could not be identical with mine, but I had no idea what it could be. Having no idea of her sexuality probably implied I had no idea of how I came to be. No one ever told me of the miraculous process by which I became a living, breathing soul. Not the church, not the state and not even my own mother or father.

Nevertheless, if there is a will to know, to understand a natural phenomenon, then I take it that there is a world of information built into the very substance of this universe. Moreover, a child’s curiosity at least in my own case would not accept the silence that surrounded the mystery, the wonder, the power and the glory of chocolate women. Indeed, walking the mile or more between junior high school and home, my classmates and I would come upon discarded pages of men’s magazines that showcased Caucasian women in provocative poses in the nude. We would study these photos instinctively searching in vain for some semblance of sexual organs to no avail.

Evidently in the 1950s, nude photos of American Caucasians were air brushed to the extent of removing all vaginal imagery. What was tastefully left was the rest of the woman’s anatomy. In the penny arcades at Lakeview Amusement Park, there were machines that showed a sequence of photographs depicting erotic adventures of Caucasians. As I turned the crank, the rapidity of the photographic stills would seem to actually come to life. One of those adventures I can still see in my mind’s eye.

A conservatively dressed Caucasian enters a male physician’s exam room and removes her clothes behind a screen. When the doctor comes in and attempts to exam her, she starts to evade his touch. When he finally persuades her to cooperate without the screen as a defense, the scenario would end. Such antics, I suppose, only heightened my curiosity to know what all these images meant. Why unclothed was she so ashamed? What did she have to hide? What was this thing that seemed to drive the physician to chase her about his office? What did he know that I still did not know?

Those two pornographic experiences coupled with the awakening testosterone in me made me look at my female superiors for an answer to the riddle those images presented. Of course such a quest to know at that time in my youth would not happen. Nevertheless,