Faith and Certainty

I would not know what to do with myself if there were nothing more to learn.  It occurred to me today that I might be forever a student of interesting things.  It occurred to someone else today that I ought to be happily paired with a Dom Priest.  (Do we know any ordained priests in the world?  I am no Christian, but I am Christ-Curious.)  And then, I began to think of everything that I knew of Christianity, because someone that I care about was hurting.  Surely, there would be comfort from her faith.  Surely there would be some magic word that would unlock the rush of soothing balm.  The problem with faith is that there is no certainty; and the problem of certainty is that it removes the blessing of faith.  This is the problem of Eve:  choosing certainty over faith.  And this is the healing restoration of Mary: believing instead of knowing; choosing Gabriel's word over the condemnation of just about everybody else in her life.  Mary's faith erases the original sin of Eve's certainty.  Jesus does for the world what Adam failed to do.  Christianity, therefore, abides; and Adamism died a quiet death shrouded in obscurity.

Personally, I live a life that I believe separates me from appetitive beasts in the world.  I strive to make decisions based on logic ("Live and let live") or self-sacrifice ("More for thee than me") as opposed to making decisions based on fear, hunger, or anxiety-avoidance.  I do not always succeed, of course; but I do strive.  What is my motivation? To separate myself from the appetites of the beast.  In other words, boobs and cocks are funny and adorable, but let's talk about important things like God and the nature of love.  While I'm bound in rope and hanging in a stone dungeon, listening to the Olympics.

I have felt hunger.  I have felt need.  I have felt as though the world were blessed and I had been cursed.  I have felt alone under a dark sky, and my face pelted with debris hurled by a screaming wind. And, I have turned around to look at where the wind was going.  It must be going somewhere extraordinary, because it carries everything there with it.  My thoughts, the red sky, even clouds are curious.  I know so much, and I seek to know so much more, and I remember the person who first shaped me and how well he controlled his appetite.  Even at his hungriest, he shared with me.  Even at his lowest, he spoke kindly to me.  Even feeling the most fear he had felt, he touched my hand tenderly.  When reduced to his most basic, primal self, even he did not growl and grunt like an angry ape: he closed his eyes gently and composed himself before uttering a word.  And so my model abides.  He made me, and he shapes me still, just as wind and water and fire made rock and shape it still.  Everything is in flux.  Everything, if you let it, grows.

I know how good it feels when wind blows me so strongly that I just go with it, not fighting it but letting myself be pushed along.  It is almost like flying.  I know how good it feels when the sun shines during a sun-shower of raindrops and hail.  I know how good it feels when I tiptoe over stone and grass and dirt, and then stand in the water and close my eyes.  It is another way to feel like I am in the right place.  I do not know God at all, and I do not know the amazing architect of the natural world.  I submit myself to the whimsy of wind and the life-force of water; to the passion of fire and to the steadiness of grounded earth.  I kneel before a clever man, and I myself have no certainty.  I have no need or hunger.  I know only that I wish to learn, and to keep learning, until I am no longer here.

(Many thanks go to Sir Will for taking me to this extraordinary Scottish place for some extraordinary picture-taking.  Loch Haven is just another reason why I love Second Life so much, and Sir Will is one more excellent human being that I am lucky to know.  I am truly blessed by my family and my friends.)

Jealousy, Part Five

Once, during a discussion about jealousy (one of many hundreds I have had since being given the assignment to explore it and figure it out) Klaudia said to me that she felt a good kind of jealousy, a sweet tingle in her tummy, when she thought about her Master.  I was new to this idea, so naturally I kept my distance: "what do you mean there is a good side to jealousy?" I asked myself, loudly.  I thought the whole point of this exercise was to exorcise.  That jealousy is a demonic invasion plague infestation infection thing.  Akin to the zombiepocalypse.  It goes right for the brains and then leaves you for dead, or that is how I thought about it.  "It is like a predator," I came to understand.  "It is like a bully," was also a familiar refrain.  "It compromises safety and sanity, and therefore consent and submission," is my own conclusion.  "It makes my tummy tingle," says Klaudia, and that just turned everything upside down.

I tried very hard to think of a way to make jealousy come from a place of love.  Jealousy gets a bad rap, naturally, and it's difficult to reverse that trend.  But I realized, as I examined an older picture of my mentor that was still in its raw state, and as I imagined all the things that I would do to digitally manipulate and enhance and "make different" and "make new" this picture of my Genny, that I had said to myself, "My Genny."  And I thought, after that, "My Genny, who looks like only I can make her look, when I take her picture."  And then I realized, "Only I see this Genny, my Genny."   When I take the picture and when I show it on display, sure, other people can observe "My Genny" but... only I saw her.  Only I captured her, treated her, polished her, and made her shine like only My Genny can.  And when I look through that lens to shoot My Genny, I do so out of love.  It's a jealousy that comes from Love.  My mentor inspires this.  And Klaudia's tummy-tingles confirm this: it is possible to feel a GOOD kind of jealousy.  The kind that says, "Nobody else can do this for you like I can, you wonderful person whom I love and will never harm."    (And incidentally, I'm not showing the My Genny picture here, because she's mine.  Sorry.)  

Jealousy, Part Two

The fundamental premise of my study of jealousy was that feelings of jealousy contradict feelings of belonging (from a submissive's point of view) and feelings of being the significant voice in the life of a loved one (from a dominant's point of view).  By that I mean to say, the extent to which a person feels like she belongs, or feels like she is the primary influence, is the extent to which a person is not feeling jealous at that moment in time.  Jealousy is defined as an anxiety over the possibility of losing someone (or, from a dominant's perspective, losing someone that we feel a type of ownership over).  The feeling that we will be replaced by someone else, in other words.  The feeling that, even though it hasn't happened (and may never happen), the possibility is undeniably and damnably distracting.

Feelings of jealousy contradict feelings of belonging.  Feelings of jealousy contradict feelings of significance.  Where this leads to is the "imaginary" part of jealousy.  It is an anxiety: if it were a wholesale loss of someone, then the feeling would be properly termed as "grief."  If it were the wholesale deception and adultery proven, then the feeling would be properly termed as "rage."  But it is neither; jealousy exists in the nebulous realm of the imagination, especially if nobody is talking about it.

If jealousy exists in the nebulous realm of the imagination, then it suggests to me a very interesting thing: jealousy also contradicts the three tenets that hold up the D/s lifestyle, those being safety, sanity, and consensual relations.  If the dom or the sub (or the Master or the slave) are in the wrecked throes of a jealous rage, all inside their imagination, it calls "sanity" into question and the mental preparation required to properly command or obey.  It calls "safety" into question and the trust one requires to come face to face with a man with a whip (so to speak).  It calls "consent" into question because, well,  is the person really here and present when she agrees to the scene if she is mentally occupied with sorting out her jealous reactions and stifling her jealous behaviours?  Is her consent valid if she is preoccupied with trying to figure out how to confront you - appropriately -  about her fears and anxieties?  Jealousy begins in the mind, but it ends in behaviour: everyday actions that look like everyday actions (baking, shutting a door) but are, in fact, the body's reaction to what the mind cannot ignore.  The body cries out when the mind is in pain, after all, and the jealous wife who bakes a little more furiously and the jealous husband who slams the door a little too loudly are just begging for some good, heart-to-heart and face-to-face communication of the "please listen" and "please focus on me" variety.

Realism, Pessimism, and Hope

"I wasn't thanking him for the coin," says Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha, talking about her great love upon first meeting him.  "Or even for the trouble he'd taken in stopping to help me.  I was thanking him for, well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now.  For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose."   This passage in the book is meaningful to me on a human level.  It has nothing much to do with D/s specifically; or BDSM or any of the alternative labels and structures for relationships that I explore in Second Life.  It has everything to do with the human beings we interact with on a daily basis.  With the people that I meet.  With You, my mighty and penetrating You.  You are like the Chairman, Sayuri's beloved.  You are like the one who brings Sayuri currency in a world of poverty.  You are like the one who brings Sayuri hope in a world of pessimism posing as "realism".
I met a man who tries to tell me the way things really are; but the way things really are in his mind are skewed by a terrible, scorpion-like anger.   I met another man who devotes his time to the growing of flowers in a vast garden, but he tends only to those who cry and fail; to those who call out with a shy silence and wound.  The flowers that breathe and thrive, on the other hand, he does not look at or enjoy, and they blossom for nobody.  I have met a man who is barely alive; rarely breathing; and infrequently amused.  I have met a man trapped by his own logic, a snake with two heads that devour to the core until nothing remains.  And I have met a man whom I could not even distinguish from the chip he bore like Atlas with the world -- a giant tumor of a chip that spoke for him, walked for him, alienated the world for him, but left him to wonder at his own loneliness, as if he could not see the chip that manipulated him.  Could you master any girl, truly? I won't allow myself to discover yes or no; I must protect myself from this.

And I have met a man who appears to me almost as though he were my own shadow --   who knows, somehow, the very curve of my wrist as though it were his own.  Who makes me feel as though I were not one of many petals but, rather, an entire blossom proper and ready, something select and chosen.  Someone careful with words.  Someone calm.  Someone with imagination.  No pretense, or so it would seem (and isn't the best art that which cannot be detected?)   And I have met a man who knows good photography when he sees it, and who shares.  I am quite enamoured with John Tisbury's photography at the moment and I'm becoming a fan.  His landscape prints can be purchased in Second Life at Alanis gallery.  Anyway, You of my clear and vivid imagination... You, Sir, have me captivated.  I am beginning to wonder if You are as intimately familiar with the curve of my wrist as I am familiar with the calm waters of your deep sea.  Sayuri committed herself, submitted herself, to the path that would lead her eventually into the arms of her Chairman.  An unwavering devotion.  So Choji walks, slowly and with sweet curiosity as butterflies and flowers surround her, towards You.