Love Letter

A necklace I made of my favorite symbol: the Sun, gold, and ever expanding knowledge.

You are the point in the center of a circle. Everything inside the circle is what you know.

The circle itself, the line drawn, is what you know you don’t know.

Everything outside of the circle is what you don’t know you don’t know…

As you grow the circle gets bigger. You know more, there’s more you’re aware of which you don’t understand, and still, the space outside that ever-growing circle of knowing is vast and infinite. And it’s still very much connected to you.

A circle with a point at it’s center. The symbol for gold and the Sun. This is my favorite symbol, I draw it on the wall in pretty much every home I live in and have for a long time. I like thinking about the space outside of my circle, that space which spreads across the plane of the wall to the ceiling and floor, into the next room, around and over the house, through my neighborhood, onward and outward into infinity… All these things I don’t know I don’t know. I take comfort in it, this understanding that I can be connected to everything yet still understand so little of what everything truly is. Looking at life this way, I can approach the world knowing that I’ll make mistakes. I might not know something important about how to interact with another person or situation, but that is to be expected at some level: I am allowed learning.

I am allowed learning. What a beautiful and important permission. One of the major reasons I’m committed to my exploration of sexuality and sensuality is that at one point in my childhood my ability to discover those things on my own terms and in my own time was taken away from me. I feel those wounds still. I know I react to the worlds of sexuality and sensuality with knee jerks at times, and those reactions were put in place long ago to protect me, but I don’t need all of them anymore. I know that there is more out there I want to be open to. There are things inside me I cannot begin to understand yet because I haven’t opened myself up to exploring them. Yet.

This is the most profound reason I love my friends so incredibly dearly. All of my open, caring, queer, curious, brave, struggling, articulate friends have given me pieces of what I didn’t know, and even what I didn’t know I didn’t know. They connect me to them, and in so also connect me more deeply to myself.

This is a love letter to the people in my life who have seen me and applauded my struggles and findings. This is a letter to those people who I see once in a blue moon, yet fall into their arms deeply and joyfully every time. This is a love letter to all of those people in my life who reflect back to me what I have helped them know. This is a love letter to people who laugh when I find out something new about myself, and who say they already knew it (there are many of you out there). This is a love letter to those people who keep asking me to try new things, who invite me to play, who don’t fault me for not being in the mood, who slow down when I get overwhelmed, who read books and watch instructional videos to learn the mechanics of acts we’re interested in, who share fantasies with me, who ask questions and get super nerdy with me about the answers, who research what happens when… This is a love letter to all those people who think that what makes us tick is worth exploring.

Thank you for existing. I need you on this journey, and like you maybe needing me, we’ll find things we didn’t know we didn’t know. We’ll face them connected, autonomously, and together.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature (Crea)

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and support me. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

I, Creature

This Creature is coming out… An Imp in all my glory, Cat dressed in people clothing, purring and biting tempestuously as I see fit…

My new name, bestowed upon me this weekend by The Baroness, is Creature. “Creature” is how I introduced myself to her, after considering she appreciates titles. Until now I’ve put off settling upon a salutation, as searching other’s solutions to this quandary, I’ve only come up empty handed. During a workshop on manners with Baroness, we were set the task of introducing ourselves to one another and then to her, and there it was, just waiting to be said: Creature.

  • Creature Karin
  • Creature

In the delicious Old Guard world of protocol, orientation dynamics, and servicing order, Mistress and Master won’t work for me. They slip on like lies, and I don’t prefer royal reference in my descriptor. Though I enjoy being called Sir, part of what I get out of it is that it pains some people to say (grin) directed toward my bumps and curves. I revel that it roots down as a loving caress from those who see me wholly, but Sir simply won’t sit up straight as a casual moniker amongst friends or if asked about within its longform reality — Mister, Monsieur, Monseigneur. Not I.

Creature fits. I am Creature. Big and small, submissive and Dominant, curious and playful, impish, imaginative, passionate, volatile, never properly perched as I quietly watch game in the room whilst picking out my targets, or occasionally melting in the teeth of a larger animal myself.

Call me Creature in your introductions please. Call me from my cave to your field of sunlit possibility, call me to your fire, your primal bed for wrestling, call me with your perversions, your dreams, your confessions of desire, fear me in the forest which is my home — yet be unable to resist reaching for my soft fur and sparkling eyes. I, Creature, see you…

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and support me. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

Domineering Brutish Communication

Is rampant on social media…

Makes me want to cry when I’m pre-menstrual…

Is extremely common in privileged and dominant culture circles…

Is not BDSM.

I am not saying kinky people communicate better than non-kinky people (oh, so very far from it in many cases, let me tell you), but I am saying that there is something about having privilege in your lived experience which frequently leads to less finely honed tools in the toolkit concerning those subjects. Without a certain amount or type of struggle in one’s life, blunter brute force often rears its head over a practiced grace like listening, not personalizing, and questioning the space between what you are hearing and the intentions and/or blindsightedness of the other speaker (and when I say speaker I frequently mean typer).

Is it really so hard to find those places within ourselves where we pause and question what someone is saying, rather than treating them as though they are inherently the enemy because we’re uncomfortable being pointed out as incorrect or less than perfectly evolved in our communicative efforts? Can we really not imagine that we are the bad guy? I’ve fucked up so many times in my life it’s, well, normal. If I didn’t face my fuck-ups though, I would still be that jerk making the same mistakes over and over again, winning the hearts and minds of precisely no one who isn’t exactly like me.

Truth: when someone hurts my feelings somewhere deep down inside (or superficially, clearly, and longingly), I want them to hurt too. I want them to feel pain and apologize for mine and do things which will comfort me and make me feel better and take away my pain. This is a very normal basic instinct. It is, though, not the best model for behavior, connecting with others, or having friendships last past our first conflict. Why are so many (often online) battles stuck in this space of reaction and attack? Why is it so hard to say “I’m feeling hurt”, and “I’m also feeling hurt” or “I’m afraid you’re mad at me or think I’m a horrible person for doing/saying something which hurt you” or “I’m sorry, what am I missing here”?

What makes us name call instead of question?

What inside us settles upon sarcasm and demeaning language instead of concern?

Two of the best pieces of advice I was ever told were:

  • Trust minorities. Believe them when they tell you things.
  • “Like”, support, and work to amplify the voices of minority people.

The reason these ideas are important is because people who have struggled know more about their struggles from personal and frequently institutional, educational, and communal sources. Someone who can tell you what it’s like to be X, probably also knows more about the subjects concerning X’s oppression than people who aren’t X. So if you care about X people, or even just want to know one X person better, or don’t want to piss X people off it’s a really good practice to listen to what X people say about Xness, and let them know you value their voices in your world.

This means a LOT of men, a lot of white people, a lot of straight people, a lot of cis people, a lot of nondisabled people, a lot of middle and upper class people, and a lot of institutionally well educated people need to learn to listen when someone who is not those things tells them that what they are saying hurts them. This is an opportunity for empathetic or sympathetic response rather than brutish debate strategy. There are always really legitimate reasons we have the blind spots we have in our language, in our logic patterns, in our communication attempts, and in our belief systems, but those blind spots being upheld as legitimate points of view isn’t the point if human connection is the ultimate goal… This means that the more privileged I am in a room, the more I listen and the less I talk. It means when I do talk, I try to speak through asking questions — legitimate questions, not leading ones trying to take back control of a personally uncomfortable narrative.

If you want to get in my pants I actually need to trust you care for the whole reality of the me that is actually living in these pants. Politics surrounding various identities are not truths applying to everyone’s life, but they’re great guidelines for understanding the struggles groups of people face. No one is their identities, but by connecting to and naming our identities, we have unique opportunities to find compassion for ourselves and others. Through exploring identity we are granted new horizons for considering intersectional realities which can help us not put our feet in our mouths frequently around people we want to figure out how to connect to and play with.

This is a lot, yet seemingly necessary, to simply state: play nice (even/especially if you need to be taught how to by the person you’re playing with because they’ve struggled institutionally and/or personally in ways you haven’t).

Play On My Friends,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and support me. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

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