Where Everything Shines as it Disappears

Want the change.
Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines
as it disappears.
Rilke

I haven't written in a long while for a couple of reasons.

The first is that my relationship with Daddy became emotionally complicated in some troubling ways and I found myself both afraid of writing vulnerably where he could see my process and too raw to share what I was experiencing. As vulnerable as I am capable of being here, I don't show you everything. I haven't shown anyone everything in regards to my experience with Daddy, it's just so deep and raw and confusing.

Our relationship ended last week and I am still sorting and processing my feelings about everything that transpired. I'm pretty certain there will be future posts that address what I have learned about myself as a submissive and emotional masochist, as well as my mission in vulnerability and healthy D/s dynamics. I have been writing, I just haven't been publishing, and now I desire to filter those posts through my current perspective.

The other intimate relationships that I was nurturing all ended as well, for various reasons. I am working through experiences of rejection, misunderstanding, disappointment and other tricky relationship territory. Now I don't have any intimate relationships at all, although opportunities for sexual intimacy with friends have arisen, so that I can at least get those needs met if I desire. Experiencing the end of so many relationships in such a short period of time has been hard on my heart. It's difficult for me to write in the midst of the heartache. I usually write after I've turned the heartache into something meaningful and beautiful. I'm still in the process of making it all beautiful.

The other reason I haven't been writing is that life threw me a curveball and my big plans to move to the Bay Area and create the life of my dreams have been put on hold for another two years. I made this decision for the best interest of my daughter, which is a relatively easy sacrifice to make since I believe raising emotionally healthy children is the most important work I can do with my life.

However, I am struggling with feelings of stuckness. I couldn't write for awhile because I was striving to find the beauty in the change - or lack of change. I have been looking for answers to big questions: How can I create the life of my dreams here in this small county that can't financially sustain the sort of work I desire to transition to? How can I find my peers in mysticism, consciousness and sacred sexuality that I've hungered for so long and haven't found in the years I've lived here? How can I experience and learn what I need to in order to become a Tantrika or other sort of healer-counselor that weaves Mysticism, Tantra and BDSM into my practice? And how do I find the sort of intimate relationship that I desire with someone as committed to consciousness, emotional health and sacred sexuality as I am - and is also a dynamic Dominant (something I now know I deeply desire) - when the local pool of possible connections is so small and keeps getting smaller (especially in regards to kink)?

Of course the truth is that I can make progress towards the work-of-my-heart while remaining in Humboldt. I have decided to return as a full partner and Hostess with The Impropriety Society. Jen W has left us to pursue motherhood, and Paddle and I are working with four long-standing Imps leaders to transition to a different leadership model by the end of the year. Having more people responsible for the organization can allow me to focus my efforts in the places I most desire to - organizational culture, community relationship, cultivating conscious leadership, activism through writing, etc. All of these contribute to my growth as a sex-positive leader and community organizer.

I can also make progress towards developing myself and my work as a personal-coach/healer through self-study, traveling to workshops & conferences, writing, building a strong web presence, and starting a part-time practice.

What really frustrates me is the sense of limitation around finding spiritual community and an intimate relationship that meets my desires and needs. I've been seeking spiritual community for as long as I've been here and had one for about 2 years out of 20. I'm skeptical I'll find one now and the spiritual gatherings I facilitated didn't lead to the kind of connection I am seeking, so I'm not sure that attempting to create my own community again will be successful.

As to intimate relationship, I don't even know that I could find a Dominant locally that could inspire me to the depths of submission that Daddy did. On-going psychological and emotional edge play like his is not common in this little community. All the local Dominants I know are primarily into physical play and occasional, light D/s. Now that bitch has been awakened, it makes me incredibly sad to have to essentially put her to sleep until someone else inspires her into being again. To find someone who can be the Dominant I desire, and is also devoted to conscious evolution and relationship, seems like an impossible dream right now.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive.
Rilke

Despite the changes - or lack of change - in my life, I am still the person I've always been. I will turn my circumstances into something beautiful. I will continue to empower myself to claim the life I truly desire. I will keep my heart open to the Universe and every opportunity it brings me. I will trust that I am on the right path, headed towards more love and creativity than I have ever known before.

Because that is what is true about the last few years of my life here in Humboldt - it does keep getting better. I am evolving in significant ways. I have the most amazing community and friendships. I am wrapped in love in a way that I didn't even know was possible three years ago. And I have faith that it will keep getting better as long as I'm willing to trust the journey and remain vulnerable to where the Divine leads me.

The Heart is a Gambler

"The way of the heart is the way of courage. It is to live in insecurity, it is to live in love and trust, it is to move in the unknown. It is leaving the past and allowing the future to BE. Only cowards can avoid a dangerous path, but then they are already dead. The person who is utterly alive will always take the risk. The heart is a gambler." Osho

Kali is having her way with me.

Everything in the physical Universe lives by cycles - ebb and flow, wave and trough, ecstasy and despair.

It is all God.

While being polyamorous and exploring love so openly exponentially increases the experiences of love in one's life, it also exponentially increases the opportunities for growth and heartache. Two months ago I was riding the high of several new attractions and exciting potentials, following my mission of vulnerability to dive deep into what the Universe offered without succumbing to fears and insecurities. I have been nurturing five on-going relationships that involve some sort of sexual and/or romantic component, but four of them are shifting into something different, if anything at all. The disappearance of beautiful relating is confusing and painful.

There have been other heart-achey situations to navigate as well. One of my best friends moved away, someone with whom I had a connection-date nearly every week, a significant loss. Some members of the Imps community decided to drag myself, my partners and the entire organization through the mud in a very public way. And my daughter is suffering from an emotional crisis.

I experienced an unusually bright and active winter, as did the Redwood Coast since we had more sun than we usually see in the Winter months. As the days progressed into the storms of Spring these last few weeks, I have been walking darker terrain. Misunderstandings. Confusion. Public drama. Rage. Rejection. Abandonment. Withdrawal. Self doubt. Guilt. Loss. Grief. Longing.

It always comes back to longing, doesn't it? Longing for something different than what is. Longing for something bigger, deeper, more. Longing for potentials to be fulfilled. Longing to belong, to be connected, to be touched, to be loved.

"Remember what you are & let this knowing take you home to the Beloved with every breath. Hold tenderly who you are & let a deeper knowing colour the shape of your humanness. There is nowhere to go. What you are looking for is right here. Open the fist clenched in wanting & see what you already hold in your hand." Oriah Mountain Dreamer

There is a deeper knowing coloring my humanness.

As I shift the focus of my life towards living conscious mysticism on a daily basis, I find that it is much easier to ride the waves of emotion and longing that move through me. I know them for what they are. While I experience heartache, I suffer very little. I am able to bear my own witness, to watch the shifts as they happen inside of me without reaction, and perceive the perfection in every situation. I still feel a wide range of emotions very strongly, but they move through me without creating chaos in their wake.

I have created a daily life in which I am supported in remembering that all is God, that I am God playing this human called April. I don't just know it intellectually, I feel it in every layer of my being.

I believe God is a consciousness that permeates everything, including us, and that this Divine Consciousness is dancing with itself through the manifest Universe(s). I like thinking that God is ecstatic in its experience of each individual being in existence - from star, to tree, to butterfly, to human. I believe that God wants to know what it's like to be me - and you - with all of our quirks in bliss and suffering.

God experiences first hand every birth and death, every blossoming and every fall from the tree, every love and every act of violence, every beautiful and terrible thing that exists. Can you imagine being conscious of Everything? Some part of me can at least intellectualize it. And some part of me feels an intuitive resonance with the idea.

This is why Mysticism and Tantra are becoming my frame for living. I desire to experience myself and you and everything in existence as God - consciously, as often as possible. I desire to awaken to the beauty of the Divine Experience in every shape that it takes.

My Heart is taking the biggest gamble - to be open and vulnerable in love to every experience and person that the Universe brings into my life - trusting that the deeper I go, the more God I will find.

Courting Kali & Mystic Awakening

I am so in love - with my self, with the Universe, with each and every person I am privileged to know. I feel as though I've finally broken through from the desire to be a mystic to the actual embodiment of a full on love affair with the Divine in Everything.

My heart is burning with love
All can see this flame
My heart is pulsing with passion
like waves on an ocean...

Behind the veils
intoxicated with love
I too dance the rhythm
of this moving world

I have lost my senses
in my world of lovers

~Rumi

I've read the erotic-mystical-love writings of Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke and others and I have hungered so deeply to know that Divinely Inspired Love. I have called myself a mystic for years, but I wasn't really living the experience, at least not like this. I have had a few ecstatic moments sprinkled throughout my life - truly feeling Oneness with All That Is - but they were rare peak moments on my spiritual journey, and often induced by drugs (peyote, ecstasy, acid) or intense community spiritual rituals. Very rarely did they just occur in every day life.

This awakening that is happening in me now - this state of near constant turned-on-ness and immense love that just keeps filling me up - this I have never experienced before. I've experienced ecstatic states every day this week.

I drive down the road from my house in the woods to town and every single time I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the flowers blooming in this early spring and the trees and the sky and the unique and beautiful homes that my neighbors live in. I go to the marsh for my lunchtime walk and I cry in a gratitude prayer for the amazing life that I've been given. I read an incredibly vulnerable blog from a dear friend across the world and I am suddenly able to perceive the Divine in everything - 20 minutes I cried and loved everything and everyone in my life and awareness. It was the most overwhelming and powerful experience of Divine Awareness / Oneness / Love for All-That-Is that I have ever known.

This mystical~emotional~sexual awakening is fierce and amazing. It is as deeply erotic as it is spiritual. I am experiencing the world around me through a sensual and erotic perspective most of the time. I am turned on in some way almost all of the time. I am experiencing the Divine in everything -- the music I listen to, what I read from others, in nature, and most especially in the people I love.

I sat with my bestest buddy during brunch today and cried because I am so incredibly in love with her and what she gives me. She was expressing her guilt around accepting generosity from others and has no idea just how much she gives by being her incredibly loving, kind, accepting, fun, cuddly self who makes me feel like one of the most beautiful people in the world when she reflects my light back to me.

Every moment of my life, no matter how ordinary, is now vibrant, rich with loving energy and meaning. All of existence is a miracle and I am aware of it nearly all the time now.

Kali, the Great Mother Goddess of the Hindu tradition, is the Source, the One that gives birth to All. Known as a slayer of demons, She destroys the army of mind-born delusions symbolized by demons that separate us from the Divine as our own true Self. To our bound, limited and contracted ego identities She may strike terror, at times appearing as a coal-black, sword-wielding, blood-smeared dancer of death and destruction. To our Divine Self, She is our supremely beautiful Beloved, our dear spouse, performing a ballet of incomparable grace, overwhelming us with love.

Kali - Hindu Goddess of Universal Creation and Destruction. Destroyer of Illusions. When you burn in Kali's Fire, your illusions and ego are burned away. I have burned in Her Fire so often that I have a very conscious relationship with Her. I've written about Her before. It's taken years for me to come to peace with the constant state of transformation that defines the modern mystic's journey. Now I am not only at peace with it, but I'm falling head over heels in love with Kali and Her power in my heart. The Fire feels different this time. I feel the creation - the pheonix rising from the ashes - more strongly than I feel the burning away of old illusions, patterns, stories and wounds.

I have recently engaged in a relationship with an amazing man who also has a conscious relationship with Kali. We are exploring both a romantic-sexual connection and a D/s relationship. It's only been three weeks, yet this relationship is already impacting my life in tremendous ways. Kali's Fire is already burning and it's delicious torment.

I've had two assignments so far and they both rocked my world. The first was to write an erotic objectification fantasy -- which was a challenge on multiple levels. I don't write stories - I write real life, I have insecurities around communicating my fantasies, and I am just learning about my objectification desires. The experience was awesome and so hot -- I was inspired by a new fantasy because of the assignment and I did a good job of writing a story because I wrote it while in an aroused state.

The second assignment involved a ritual over the course of three nights -- creating an erotic-submissive sacred space for Him around me and inside of me, reading a sacred text describing a spiritual-erotic ritual in honor of Kali, a contemplation of some questions, and then writing about my experience. What came from that exploration was self-altering. I saw the Divine in myself and broke through to a much deeper level of self love. I don't know if I can be vulnerable enough to write about that experience publicly, but maybe it will one day have a post of its own.

For years I have been hungering for someone who would dive into God with me through sex and relationship. I didn't/don't know how to have that kind of relationship, but I knew intuitively that experiencing relationship as sacred practice and sexual exploration as an expression of spiritual yearnings would be a powerful and transformative experience. And it is. I am now living this dream of mine and it is remarkable.

He is a catalyst for my process of mystical awakening. It started before Him and it isn't because of Him, but He is a Gift from the Universe in catalyzing my experience. There is awakening happening in Him, too.

Tonight He said He was considering the idea of our being in a triad relationship with Kali, the Divine. Imagine that, a triad relationship with God. Really? Is that possible? It's mad and it's amazing and it's right. It's what I desire more than anything else in the Universe. To know God through loving another person as deeply, as vulnerably as possible, that is the greatest turn on there is in my world.

He is wicked smart, deeply passionate about making a difference in the world, a beautiful poet, and so very many things that turn me on. One of His gifts is to mirror my light back to me in words, telling me what He sees in me, what He appreciates in me. As if He sees the Divine in me, too.

He likes and desires my strength, my empathy/intuition, my intelligence, my spirituality, and my submissive sluttiness. He even loves my long letters. I can be all of myself with Him.

Three months ago I decided to change my life, to live more authentically and pursue the life of my dreams. Now the Universe is dropping my dreams in my lap. This love affair, it's not just catalyzing my personal growth around relationship, it's also helping me to understand my Divine Spark more, to figure out what it is I am meant to give to the world. It's all integrated.

I have opened my heart to the Universe, surrendering to where I am guided, following intuition through each new door that opens to me. The result is a new relationship that seems to be a dream come true, a more authentic relationship to the Imps that allows me to express my gifts more deeply and with more presence and joy, and this mystical awakening that is rocking my world in every possible way. It's touching me at work, making me more present to the people I interact with in the mundane every day world. It's touching my spiritual life through my new relationship and the spiritual gatherings I'm facilitating. It's touching my friendships as I experience a deeper love for everyone in my life.

I am courting Kali and awakening the mystic within me. This is the life of my dreams, right here, right now. I can't even imagine what the Divine has in store for me next.

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Art by A. Andrew Gonzalez