Coyote Too

As Icarus flew on wax-bound wings
So mine are joined with bonds of love

But your passion so outshines me

That I may plummet, wings undone
And tears will flutter to the sea

Several weeks ago Mollena (@Mollena) asked me several questions on FormSpring. I finally got around to answering them (in other words, I was desperately avoiding doing taxes) and I thought two of them might be worth posting here. I've done a little minor editing, but if you read what I wrote on FormSpring, you've seen these already.

What intimidates you about dominance? by Mollena

Responsibility. I've yet to play on a casual basis, although I would like to (oddly, that requires more confidence, more on that in a second). My play has been in the context of relationships with at least some level of commitment, and that commitment as a Dom has meant that I have a great deal of responsibility for the emotional well-being of my partner. In many ways, that's an incredibly egotistic thing to take on, and it is something that scares me every day. It's bad enough to start a vanilla relationship and worry about whether you really love them, whether it will fall apart, how it will impact them. But when you do that in a D/s relationship, there is a lot more at stake.

Secondly, I'm intimidated to some degree by experienced Doms, but that has fairly quickly dissipated, because unless you're there to put on some gorgeous rope show for the crowd, or show off your skills with a singletail, the true measure of the Dom is the reaction of the sub. My focus right now isn't on technique, it's on sensation, and I pretty much stop being aware of anyone else when I am in a scene.

Thirdly, experienced subs intimidate the hell out of me. (Yes, that definitely includes you Mollena :). I'm not worried about doing things “wrong”, but being clumsy, stepping over boundaries, being compared to others, and simply not satisfying my partner, are all issues. It's all the things guys worry about in terms of normal sexual relations, but magnified 100 times. In my limited time in this space, I haven't played with too many people with much more experience than myself, so this hasn't been a major issue. What I've generally found is that I go too easy on my partner. That I can solve if given a second chance. ;)

Related to that, I worry that my partner will want me to push limits that I'm not ready to push. However the things I want to push seem to be growing far faster than my opportunities to top, so that hasn't been much of a problem yet! LOL.

Oh, and penis size of course. :)

D/s culture replete with ways to punish a submissive, but what happens when the Master goes astray and hurts the submissive? Who punishes him?

The answer is quite simple. The Master punishes himself.

Whether the relationship is for a single scene or a life time. Whether it takes place in a club, a bedroom, or across the internet. Whether it's for show, for play, or fundamental Need. No matter what the time, the setting, or the reason; the Master took on a responsibility to care for the submissive. Her well-being becomes not just his responsibility, it becomes his well-being. Just as her pleasure becomes his pleasure, so her pain becomes his pain. You cannot have one without the other. So long as the relationship exists, the two are bound, not just together, but within each other. Pleasure and pain. Trust and responsibility. Master and submissive. One being.

I wrote this for a friend who keeps stopping short of exploring her creativity, because she fears the joy will be short-lived; cut down by the mundane process of selling, lack of appreciation, inability to find those who will share her interests, or a simple lack of time. At the core, she feels it is safer to stay unfulfilled, than to experience joy that might be lost and never regained—and that is a fear that we have all experienced at one time or another. She likened it to the fear of opening Pandora's Box.

You hesitate to open the jar, because you fear that the pleasure will be fleeting, that it will not lead to new discoveries and new pleasures. But Pandora's jar did not hold all evil, and not all that was good, escaped.

"Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds." (Hesiod, Works and Days)

Hope is what keeps me going through everything else in my life, it always has. And I know that if I don't open the jar, there will be no Hope.

If there's one thing my roadtrip has done, it's remind me of how lucky I am. It's not a time of my life when I feel particularly lucky, but I when I stop and think about it rationally, I've had a very fortunate life. I was at the right place at the right time at several key moments in my life, which led to a career which I have loved. I found a partner who, while we ran into a lot of (eventually terminal) issues between us, was in many ways the perfect yin to my yang. The result was a great home, and joint parenting which produced two bright, creative (and even fairly organized :-) kids whom I'm immensely proud of. We created something better than ourselves.

When I get depressed about where things are now, I try to remember that many of my friends never had those chances, or only got there after a great deal of pain and hard work. When I look at the house, and all the things we did together, I remind myself that while the future we tried to build is lost, I learned a great deal and became a much better person as a result of the experience, and most of all; the kids got to enjoy the results of our endeavors. It doesn't take away the pain, but it makes it more worthwhile.

xkcd: Every Damn Morning

Dreams are certainly odd things. My mother believes they can foretell the future, and indeed when I was young, I was certain she was magic, because things would happen, and she would say she had seen them in a dream. Later I wondered more about cause and effect, and I learned from my own experience that dreams aren't the only odd thing, memories can be strange as well. They warp, they change over time. Things remembered often become more real, more rational. Other memories drift away in the dust on the edge of our road.

It could well be that dreams are nothing more than nighttime sensations which our mind interprets as memories. They have no form until the brain shapes them into something which we can recognize. We've all felt some pieces of a dream fade as we seek to remember, while others, even if they seem less important, become more concrete just because they are more like real life.