Flight

I like to pimp other people’s blogs when I run across something I just have to share.  I don’t know if it’s “blog etiquette” or not to do so, or if you’re supposed to follow some clandestine rules you’d only know about if you are “in” in the blogosphere, but I like to do it.  When somebody else’s writing or thoughts have inspired me to think or write or question (or masturbate, for that matter), I want to point them out here, give a little heads-up to someone who may not have stumbled across them before.  Today’s post, “Im Flying”, in Kami Robertson’s blog, “On the Way of Exploration” is one such post.
In this case, it’s not so much the content, although her thoughts are wonderful, her writing eloquent, on the subject at hand, but a particular photo, the last one in the series, that touched me and got me thinking.  When I think about what it is I seek in what it is we do, that photograph encompasses it.  That acquiescence, that exhaustion, that surcease of self that exists only when my mind has been completely cleared in an intense scene, that is what I seek.  That moment when I am free of “me”, or even of him, free of the world around me.  Floating in a no-space, a space of ultimate surrender, free of desire and need, of thought and of the fears that hobble me, of the questions and the petty vanities, of every thing that binds me to the earth.
On the heels of these thoughts are those I’ve been thinking about since a conversation with a friend.
I was talking with this friend the other day about her approach to BDSM play.  She is fairly new to BDSM, so likes a high degree of control in what potentially happens to her.  Every scene, every action that the Top can or may take, is tightly and specifically negotiated.  I understand what this is about for her: self-preservation.  It is she that controls where & how far she goes, and, for her, it makes perfect sense.  She needs that reassurance–it is an essential element for her to be able to allow herself to go as far as she does within the context of that particular scene.  It is, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the only way that she is able to relinquish the control she does during a scene.  Later she may want to go farther, may decide she is ready/willing to stretch a boundary, but the when and how of that is something over which she has very specific, and ultimate, control.
On the other hand, if I were to have that kind of control, I couldn’t find that space I talk about.  I need that lack of control, that lack of self-determination, in order to go there.  It is in the very act of giving up that control that I truly fly free. Of course it is a mix of endorphins and adrenaline, a swirl of chemicals in the bloodstream that induce it, but to really truly find “subspace”, to truly fly in my head as well as in my body, my mind has to be free, and it is in the psychological edge of not having that control that my mind is finally allowed that freedom.
I don’t negotiate scenes with the Mean Guy, in fact I don’t even know what he’s planning till he gets there.  He actually says what he is “planning” isn’t always planned till we are together anyway, in the heat of things;  it’s a moving target based on any number of factors–any of which can change at any time.  I do admit to getting a delicious shiver when he mentions that he is planning something, or when he says, later, “I’d been thinking about doing this to you/planning to do that to you for days.”  That he spends part of his day thinking about ways to display/hurt/humiliate/maybe even (gasp) pleasure me just makes me about swoon.  Seriously.  If I knew going in, every time, what was potentially going to happen, if it was my decision/choice about what he could or couldn’t do to me…I don’t think it would work so well.  What I like is knowing that is isn’t my choice–what I need is to submit to what he wants, whether I want it or not…to surrender to him without a safety net.  To give up control.  Only then am I truly free.
Flying, indeed.