That Time Jeff Buckley Made Love to Me: Celebrating the Sensual Masculine and His Wild Gifts

Photo by Bob Berg, 1994, Getty Images

I’m in the middle of a strange life review, something apparently characteristic of someone soon turning 30 and sifting through the hearty, humbling mess of their Saturn’s return.

As part of this contemplation of everything I’ve been, felt, lost, dreamed, and acted out over the past 30 years, I was reflecting on the musical albums that have changed my life.

The ones that opened something in me, a very real doorway in my being, to another dimension of possibility.

And I couldn’t help but notice that many of them were by men, and men with an incredible level of male Shakti (life force).

Men who were wild, creative, and unbridled in their sensuality. Men who were disruptive poets and unapologetic lovers. Men who, deliberately, embodied the gifts of their inner magician.

That’s what I experienced, spellbound, when, as a girl, I listened to and watched artists like Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin.

And… that damn Jeff Buckley.

Look, I’m not even trying to be provocative with this article’s title. Because, have you ever listened to Grace (the album) by Jeff Buckley?

If you have, you’ll know — what could this album be compared to but an utterly surrendered, mystical session of ecstatic lovemaking?

That most sacred of human gifts where the physical and spiritual meet, in a love-drenched continuous movement of life, singing in sweet unison, birthing wild creative potentials with every breath? 

Cover of Jeff Buckley’s album, Grace

As a teenager listening to Grace, I was being initiated by a masculine I’d yet to experience directly in my own world. A sensual magician, whose every note and guitar vibration resonated an unspeakable ache in my body — an ache to be touched, to be soulfully awakened, to be radically opened to every pulsation of life!

To this day, Grace still feels much like a shamanic journey, but one that is filled with pleasure and rapture, where the dissolution and grief that precede all rebirth become so sweet that we enter them willingly.

There are moments in the album where Jeff’s voice escalates, infusing you with his dreadfully beautiful poetry, stretching your every particle with his nearly unbearable sustained high notes—and it’s almost too much.

He’s bringing you to the edge of chaos, the event horizon of black holes, the point of no return. It seems your entire inner structure just might dissolve, before being put back together in a whole new configuration.

Oh yeah. Just that.

This is the delicious death-rebirth mystics speak of, and that all intoxicated lovers know intimately.

And that’s the metaphorical death we’re being asked to consciously traverse, each in our own way. All we need to do is look around to see that there’s an inevitable journey of personal and collective rebirth we’re living into.

As women, this sensual magician just might be the key to going to the Underworld willingly, to collect our lost power and meet our most forbidden spaces.

In my experience, this magical masculine can enchant us into dropping all our masks and descending into the raw and liberating truth of who we really are.

Somehow, through his sheer fertile presence, he liberates the tensions, the fears, the contractions of the past. He’s so bewilderingly beautiful that all the closed doors in our hearts and bodies suddenly open.

He escorts us down into a dark womb space of rebirth and emergence, where we not only rebirth ourselves, but also rebirth our relationship to the masculine.

If these times mark the re-emergence of the sacred feminine, they also herald the return of the benevolent, sensual magician, and his marvelous generative capacity in service to life.

This energy that will resurrect our most numbed, left-for-dead inner spaces is beyond gender and takes many forms, but in my personal journey, I must acknowledge, celebrate, adore, dance for, and burn with grateful love for this masculine that’s given me so much life, and who, time and time again, has helped me re-open me to my own forgotten magic.

In special threshold moments, we meet as equals and allies on this great journey of re-weaving the whole. Sacred moments where a new, beautiful, exciting evolutionary potential is fertilized and seeded by our encounter.

I’m working on a larger essay on this whole topic, and for now, I just want to say a big public THANK YOU to this masculine essence infusing our world.

Thank you to my beloved man and to my brothers who continually inspire me. And thank you to the artists, philosophers, and devoted magicians who catalyze our collective soul into a most delicious, nourishing way of healing, and becoming.

Sensual magicians, you’re re-fertilizing the world with beauty, with a new breath, with a wild masculine light that is feeding the deepest roots of the feminine and of life herself.