To make love is like tending a garden
We plant the seed, water it, and clear the weeds, but we cannot command it to grow. We can only create the right conditions, prepare the soil, nurture the space, and wait. Growth unfolds in its own mysterious way. Sex and true intimacy are no different. We can ready ourselves with care and intention, but what happens in the moment is never fully ours to produce. It is as if something larger, something alive and unpredictable, takes over. Alan Watts writes that life itself is a play of forces beyond our control, and when we learn to meet it with openness rather than mastery, we rediscover what it means to be surprised.
When I speak of love here, I don’t mean romance or possession, but eros — the living energy of attraction that draws us toward connection, curiosity, and renewal. This kind of love asks for openness rather than control, a willingness to meet another being as they are and to be changed by what we find. It is not the love of ownership or idealisation, but of participation, the art of being present to life as it unfolds through touch, trust, and surprise. In Nature, Man and Woman, Watts reminds us that nature does not strive; it grows. He contrasts the Western impulse to dominate, to analyse, control, and perfect, with the Eastern intuition of participation. To live and to love is not to stand apart from the world as its architect, but to move within it as part of its unfolding.
When we bring this understanding to sex, the act ceases to be a performance or a goal. It becomes communion, a shared discovery rather than a conquest. Like the patient gardener, we learn to trust the intelligence of the moment, the quiet wisdom of our own bodies, and the unspoken rhythm between ourselves and another. Fear, however, lies at the root of our struggle with intimacy. The other person, their mystery, their difference, their unpredictability, stands just beyond our control, and that can feel unbearable. So we try to bring them within our grasp, to make them safe, to make them known. But in doing so, we flatten what is most vital about them.
When we succeed in mastering the encounter, we destroy the very thing that drew us to it: its aliveness. Sex becomes a repetition of what we already know, a mirror reflecting only ourselves. We gain mastery, perhaps, but at the cost of wonder. As Watts warned, “to define is to kill; to suggest is to create.” When we release the need to control, we make space for renewal, for something genuinely new to enter both ourselves and the world. When we open ourselves to surprise in sex and intimacy, we open to another consciousness — one as vast and complex as our own. Within them lives an entire world: stories, memories, fears, and small glories. To meet this other fully is to be offered a new perspective on ourselves and on life itself.
But this meeting can only happen when both people remain free, when the other is allowed to stay other. True intimacy does not collapse difference; it honours it. For this to unfold, certain conditions must exist: trust, safety, and connection. We need to trust that the other is not here to harm or possess us, and to offer the same assurance in return. Then the meeting can take place — two separate beings uniting for a time, only to part again, each changed, each carrying something of the other within them. In true intimacy, power is not seized but passed back and forth. We give and receive in equal measure, discovering ourselves through the mirror of the other.
Because trust exists, we are freed from the need to grasp or control. We can let the other lead for a time, taking in the view as we move together. What allows this is not mastery over them, but mastery over ourselves — the discipline to stay open, to choose freely, and to offer only what is genuine. Each gesture, each response, becomes an act of faith. We risk rejection, as does the other, yet this shared vulnerability is what makes the moment alive. Whatever arises, pleasure, tenderness, even uncertainty, is held within the bonds of connection. In this space, both partners are able to see, to understand, and to accept what is.
Watts saw the erotic not as something separate from life but as its purest expression. The meeting of two bodies is, in miniature, the same creative pulse that drives the universe — the ebb and flow of attraction and release, union and return. In this rhythm, no one dominates and no one submits; each completes the other, as the wave completes the shore and the shore gives shape to the wave. When we approach sex with this awareness, it becomes more than an act between two people. It becomes participation in the larger dance of being itself — a moment where consciousness meets nature, where the human and the divine briefly coincide. To make love, in this sense, is to feel the universe remembering itself through us.
In our time, we live under relentless pressure to do more, achieve more, control more, from our work to our relationships, from our bodies to the natural world itself. We grasp and strive, pruning and shaping as though perfection could ever be forced. Even our gardens become monuments to control rather than invitations to rest. Yet beneath the noise and effort, a quieter truth waits. The point of the garden, and of love, is not mastery but pleasure: the simple joy of being alive among living things.
When we pause our endless doing and allow ourselves to feel, to look inward, and to meet the other as a reflection of the same cosmos unfolding within us, something softens. The flowers, the trees, the lover, and the self all reveal themselves as one continuous movement of life — the universe opening its eyes to itself, surprised once again by its own beauty.
If these ideas stir something in you — a wish to explore connection, trust, and openness — you’re welcome to reach out. I’d be glad to continue the conversation.
Email me: eq@elliottquinncompanion.com.au
My heart to yours
Q