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.

Coming Out of the Spiritual Closet

From today's entry in Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening (I want to give this book to everyone I know):

Being true to who we are
means carrying our spirit like a candle
in the center of our darkness.

If we are to live without silencing or numbing essential parts of who we are, a vow must be invoked and upheld within oneself. The same commitments we pronounce when embarking on a marriage can be understood internally as a devotion to the care of one's soul: to have and to hold...for better or for worse....in sickness and in health....to love and to cherish, till death do us part.

This means staying committed to your inner path. This means not separating from yourself when things get tough or confusing. This means accepting and embracing your faults and limitations. It means loving yourself no matter how others see you. It means cherishing the unchangeable radiance that lives within you, no matter the cuts and bruises along the way. It means binding your life with a solemn pledge to the truth of your soul.

It is interesting that the nautical definition of marry is "to join two ropes end to end by interweaving their strands." To marry one's soul suggests that we interweave the life of our spirit with the life of our psychology; the life of our faith and truth with the life of our doubts and anxiety. And just as two ropes that are married create a tie that is twice as strong, when we marry our humanness to our spirit, we create a life that is doubly strong in the world.

Yes. This is what is seek, to make myself stronger in the world by marrying my humanness to my spirit. I am withdrawing from Imps leadership - and the pursuit of full-time/partnership relationship - because I need to learn to hold space for humanness, first my own so that I can better hold space for others. I am choosing to dive into my spirit, to strengthen my relationship with the Divine within so that I can better relate to the Divine in the others. I am pulling back and examining every life choice from the perspective of integrity and desire: is this aligned with what I know about myself, what I know about Love, and my Divinely inspired desires for my life?

I need to fall in love with my self and my dreams. I need to learn who April really is and fall madly, deeply in love with all that I find: both my Divine Spark and my imperfect human filled with quirky desires that are spiritual and hedonistic, generous and narcissistic, creative and ordinary, playful and dark.

Letting go of the Impropriety Society is one of the most difficult things I have ever done. But over and over God has asked me to turn my heart towards my spiritual longing, and over and over I have only gone so far and then said no, I will go no further. I would entangle myself in relationship or creative projects, and exhaust myself so that solitary time was spent vegging out in recovery rather than in soul-feeding activities (art, writing, reading, spiritual practice, yoga, etc.). I would keep my spirituality subdued, so that the people who know and love me best really have no idea how important God and the spiritual life is to me. And my emotional, physical and spiritual health suffered for it. I am not living in integrity with my faith and my truth.

This is how deep my faith is: I have known every single moment of my life that there is some kind of God/Universal Energy/Sacred Presence, something that binds all of life and feeds the passionate energy of evolution. I believe conscious growth and evolution is the point of everything. We are pieces of God experiencing all of life through evolution. And somehow it's all powered by Love.

I have always, even in my darkest moments, felt held by God and trusted the power of Love. This seems to be a rare life experience, to not have known one moment of doubt or faithlessness. I don't know how to explain my deep abiding faith in God and Love, especially in light of how much trauma and loss I have experienced in my life. Maybe I was born with it. Maybe faith is part of my unique genius.

It is this faith that keeps me choosing open-heartedness as much as I possibly can no matter what happens in my life, no matter the heartache and painful experience that comes from being vulnerable. I trust that I cannot be broken. I trust that God and Love will keep me safe and thriving in life no matter what circumstances come my way. I trust that the only thing that holds me back is my fear, which is why I work so hard to become conscious of my fears and fear based behaviors. I shine the light into my darkness so that I may act in enlightenment and love as often as possible.

And maybe this genius for faith and my desire to contribute to our collective evolution is why I am drawn to this idea of sex positive spiritual guidance (coaching, counseling, whatever), with a creative twist (using art/music/writing projects as part of the coaching process), as the kind of work I desire to be doing in the world. I believe this is my bliss, the vocation I have been looking for since I initiated myself 15 years ago as Priestess/Bodhissatva, surrendering my life in devotion to lightening the suffering of all beings. That has always been the driving motivation of my community service, art, writing, and my flavor of giving friendship and love.

My first step towards this goal is putting out an invitation very soon for spiritual community to gather in my home on a biweekly basis to share ritual, prayer/meditation, study and discussion about the spiritual journey (and whatever else we decide to do together). Through conversations with community members I have found that for some of us there is a hunger for spiritual connection. We believe in some kind of Divine Presence or Universal Energy or Sacred Connection, and we see its importance and expression in our relationships. We don't feel comfortable in churches. We don't know of any spiritual communities for sex positive, bdsm practicing, queer and poly freaky people. Even the ones that embrace freaky folk don't bring discussions of these parts of our lives into the spiritual conversation. And what we get from the sex positive community doesn't fill our longing to share our personal spiritual journey with others who feel a connection to the Sacred in some way. I desire this in my own life and so I am going to try to facilitate the creation of it within our community.

The interesting thing is that I have been thinking and talking about doing this for two years. Truthfully, I've been feeling called to it for many years in various forms and I have kept saying no. I probably have friends who doubt I'll follow through this time because they've been listening to me talk and not act for so long. But I can't ignore the longing in my own heart any longer...or the fact that a week after deciding to resign from the Imps the Universe sent me a friend who specifically asked me to do this because she needs it, too. It doesn't get any more obvious that I am being called than that.

Being true to who I am is bridging transcendent spirituality with immanent earthy human life and sexuality. To marry my own soul is to marry the importance of my spiritual path to the rest of my life, despite the fears of exclusion, rejection, loneliness, etc. I am following God's call to come out of the spiritual closet and am trusting that my tribe and community, who has held all the freakiness and quirky Aprilness I could throw at them, will continue to hold me, support me and connect with me where I am most in integrity with the truth of who I am.

I am trusting Love.

***
Image Source: Born of Light by Meganne Forbes

Your Life Is Your Art (said Anais Nin)

I love Fall. I am sitting here with my laptop drinking a cup of tea, warmed by the roaring fire in the woodstove, surrounded on two sides by views of the trees, sun streaming through the windows, and I find myself in a strange place of both deep comfort and unsettledness. I am sitting with a significant decision I've made to near completely change my life over the next 7-9 months.

All of my life I have been making my life from found art. I have taken what the Universe drops in my path and made the most extraordinary beauty I could possibly muster from it. I have transformed tragedy into treasure, at times literally turning it into service, art and poetry that impacted other people's lives in positive ways. I made motherhood my art, attempting creative mastery at holding space for my children's conscious unfolding. I've chosen unsatisfying but secure administrative work that pays well in order to provide for my children, and have learned how to become a good leader and successfully run an organization with a fairly healthy and very loving culture because of my experience.

Whatever life hands me, no matter how dark, dirty or mundane, I will transform it into something remarkable.

All of my life I have also made myself visible by serving the needs of others. I had a revelation through an NLP session with Dave Berman at Manifest Positivity that I believe I earn my visibility to others through my generosity and service. If I was not giving, then I didn't believe I was visible or lovable. I believed that I had to justify or earn my existence and love from others.

I have never taken a significant life dream of my own and brought it into reality. I haven't actually spent much time dreaming, not really. One reason is that I haven't had the time for it because I am so busy serving other people's dreams, whether it's my children's dreams, or my partner's dreams (when I have one), or my employer's dream for their organization and the dreams of the people they serve, or the dreams of the Imps community (or whatever community I'm volunteering for).

Another reason I haven't dreamed much is because I didn't believe dreams could come true for me. In my early 20's, after having to make so many sacrifices of my own desires to meet my children's needs, I stopped believing that I could have anything different. They came first and then I tried to satisfy pieces of myself wherever I could find the space (making sculptures while watching movies with the family, late night writing after everyone was asleep, occasional weekend trips to the city, etc.).

It's not that I don't have dreams, I just haven't spent much time with them. I have dreams that live in the background of my heart. Since I was a teenager I have dreamed of being a writer who touches other people's lives in a positive way by sharing my stories and the insights into being human that they've unfolded in me. I've dreamt of creating community based multi-media art projects that bring healing to groups that are in conflict. I've dreamt of telling other people's stories through art and writing, stories of people who are different and need to be understood for who they are, or people who have survived terrible things that we need to change in the world but are too damn complacent because the realities don't touch us. I used to talk about searching for some kind of grant funding that would allow me to focus on creative work (but never really believed it would happen for me).

I have also dreamed a long time of being a counselor of some kind, helping people make sense of their life stories, offer experiences that facilitate healing, and support them in living consciously. At times I've thought about it through the lens of spiritual guidance. Now maybe I would call it sex positive spiritual guidance.

Two weeks ago I decided it's time to make my dreams come true. I am going to refocus my energy into creating the work of my heart. I am going to put my energy this winter into figuring out how to transition from my current work to the work I desire to be doing with people. Steps toward this will include working through the Fire Starter Sessions (which I purchased months ago but haven't spent any time with), changing my blog home and purpose, promoting my writing, participating in establishing a sex positive peer support group, and creating/facilitating a spiritual community of some kind.

I am also planning to relocate, probably to the Bay Area, next summer. I am dreaming of finding community that meets my needs spiritually and creatively and I've never really found it in Humboldt. There are many amazing people here and I am so incredibly grateful for their presence in my life, but I've never found resonance with other artists or spiritual communities here. I feel an urban area that draws a much wider diversity of creative and spiritual people might be a better fit for me.

Shifting my focus means that I am resigning immediately as a hostess (event coordinator) for the Impropriety Society. I don't know exactly that my relationship to the Imps will look like over the coming months, but it will be changing in significant ways to make space in my life for following my heart. While I love our community and love the impact the parties have on people's lives, I am not getting my needs for personal fulfillment met by big event production. I've been serving a need I see rather than serving in ways that bring me the most joy.

I look foward to witnessing how the Imps will continue to grow and thrive in my absence. I trust my partners and the people who have stepped into leadership to both carry forward the best of who are now and create new visions of who we could be. And perhaps I will carry the Imps into my new home in some way, bringing our vision for inclusive sex positive culture into a place that has allowed diversity to keep people apart.

Whatever role the Imps play in my life from here forward, it's time for me to craft my life into the masterpiece I know it can be and will allow me to serve in ways that bring me the most joy.

I am a Masochist for God

I have often said that my biggest kink is evolving. I am literally turned on by the process of conscious growth, especially periods of intense transformation.

The truth is that I am a masochist for God. The deep surrender that I give as a submissive in BDSM play is a reflection of the greater surrender that I strive to give to God every day of my life.

I love, love, love the process of growth. I savor the burn of Kali's Fire. Yes, it is painful to grow, but pain does not have to be suffering. It can be traumatic to let parts of my self that are no longer needed to die. It can hurt like hell to break out of self-imposed fear prisons and allow the heart to expand into love. But it can also feel exhilarating, exciting and joy-full as new pieces of my self are revealed or new connections are weaved between pieces I've already known. There is tremendous relief in the emotional releases that occur throughout a dark night of the soul. And then I always come out the other side with a permanent transformation into greater awareness and deeper love. The whole process makes me feel very alive.

The last few days I have been high on this glorious experience of transformation, even in the moments of my deepest vulnerability, discomfort and heartache. Knight said the other day that I am glowing. Something significant has shifted in me and the insights are flowing faster than I can document them. I surrendered to the Divine and to Love in this experience of losing my life-partner and it's like the floodgates have opened emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. I am buzzing with the thrill of it all and where I know it will lead me.

I am learning so much about how wounded souls relate and what is needed for relationship to thrive in healthy love. But I don't think I'm just learning it for me, I think I'm learning it so I can share it with others. At the same time that I'm having all of this growth around relationship, I am also having some amazing insights about my life purpose.

I am one of those people who believe we all have a unique genius or Divine Spark to give the world (a Divine Spark is the God in us being expressed as a unique personality). We all have a calling to something that only we can meet with our strange combination of personality quirks and life experiences. I recently came across the recommendation of noticing what people say they appreciate about you and how that is a reflection of your purpose. At the Imps leadership meeting several weeks ago I was told by someone that what they most appreciated about me is my journey -- how I am always striving to grow. I am realizing that consciously pursuing the fullest expression of my Divine Spark, and sharing my process of growth with others, is a significant aspect of my unique genius. Oh, I am an evolution genius! I think that the Universe has put me through the school of really hard knocks, given me an obsession with experiencing the greatest potential of love, and then compelled me to write about it, make art about it and do healing work, as a means of giving others a light on the journey.

I have been telling myself for years that I don't have the credentials to help people on their evolutionary journeys. I've been keeping myself small in administrative work because I don't have a piece of paper that says I am qualified to coach or counsel others. I haven't written a book or started a business of some kind because I feel like I'm not an "expert" in anything. And yet I haven't felt the call to go back to school. In fact, even though I am a passionate learner, institutionalized learning and I are not compatible. Over the years I have been feeling the intuitive knudge to trust there's another way to transition into healing work. But I've had no solid leads on what it could be, until recently, when I started coming across people who are doing healing work that also don't have pieces of paper, but have tremendous life experience and self-directed learning. People who trust themselves and claim their gifts with boldness and confidence.

What I haven't been trusting is that I have been going through a different kind of education that allows me to help others from the place of having been there and made my way out. Instead of going to years of school to get a degree in Pyschology, I have lived through the process of healing several significant traumas and transforming my own mental illness by studying psychology, consciousness and spirituality and applying what I learn to my own life. I have not been giving myself the appropriate credit for being my own therapist and spiritual teacher.

Many years ago, someone who was helping me on my spiritual path told me they believed that I lived through so many difficult experiences, and have such a strong capacity for empathy, so that I could accompany others on their journey through the dark night. Instead of sitting in a classroom and talking about how violence affects families, I have lived through and then healed violence in my own home. Instead of learning how to counsel others in a formal setting, I have been putting the healing work that I have learned into action in my own relationships. Instead of writing a doctorate thesis, I have been working on the frontlines of building a community through striving for healthy relationship and deeper love.

I started this post thinking about how I am head-over-heels in love with God and Life right now. But I'm ending this stream of consciousness with the realization that I'm falling in love with my self. I have been so focused for so long on making myself better, that I haven't realized I already am. I've been focusing on my fears and where I need to heal so intensely because I believe I'm still broken. But I'm not.

I am not broken.

I am whole. I will always be in the process of evolution toward greater awareness and deeper love, but I am whole right here, right now.

And I have so much to give others from that wholeness.

Excuse me while I go sit with that and cry for a bit.

Oh, and thank you for witnessing me. I really appreciate it.