Why Write? Why Kink? Why Find? Why Say?

11219643_10206631497961241_2668328861748374150_nFrom the darkness… Creation. A light glows, imperceptible upon arrival, grows; soon unbearable its revelatory castings. Illumination of the surroundings shocks and surprises; we explore further. Knowledge. Finding. Soft touching in the dark becomes heat, breath, desire unspoken and found in shared imperceptible inches of consent. Movement yeses, eyes locked in fearsome asking, receiving smiles — all these affirmations. Together in time, between gain and retreat, we come whole and are spent.

I am asked, how do you set out on this journey into the darkness? How to prepare? How to find solitude and nothing when tears are heavy, excitement ready for flight, inner conversations shouting louder than the rumble of everything outside? What is beyond the trumpeting brass band of living? I hold attention with my eyes. I see you. I sigh. I close my eyes and inhale. My arm reaches towards your body and we touch. Melt, in fact, into one another’s flesh a moment. Held in comfort’s release. This. This is everything in the world. You are here. I am here. We find here for ourselves in one another’s company, sensual input, no input, even in the alone nothingness this body is always here to touch, even to feel from the inside out. My brain will whisper secrets if I listen closely… From the nothing creation will come; a something is born and will be when I let it.

Connection is the Temple where I pray and over time I’ve learned rites for growth, for reactionary anger-fueled tearing down for to build anew, rites for wild abandon to stir it all up, for fantasy sparking, and conversely for touching earth and finding calm, I have learned slow, I have learned the smell of decay, I have learned the fertile ground sewn by Sister Death.

Recently I had an emotional episode, emotional grinding and unbearable. The million wounds of living reopened and scrubbed mercilessly with salt. I was a melted pot holding nothing in the heat and overcome by my task. This went on, and longer. Even after my wet eyes dried and the wracking coughs of misery died, I suffered slow heart and tired. Days shuffled by and no more bearing to feel this chasm could be… Employing meditation, self care, kindness, I came to the conclusion that the only way to move forward was by radically letting go. There is nothing in this moment threatening from the past, and trapped there I am not able to be here. And I am here.

I am here.

I. Am. Here.

I am here now and what I can be is what occurs in each moment of my experience. To remain here is the work of a million moments of failure and introspection. What I need is to cut ties to past and speak to my present. I must listen and consider in real time. Now.

And so I lit candles and let go, jumped, brought free fall into my experience, and in falling I found finding. On the way down time expanded and I could construct all directions from my changing point of reference, even up.

This story is about a person: an Everyperson who considers opportunity for something more — I mean, we all desire, want, fail, hope, move through life with questions and impulses fed by imperfect wantings… Our Everyperson suffers the foils of a limited body and judgmental mind, but the character in our tale also moves impulsively and employs intuition as a guide. Our hero asks and tries and learns. Within these pages you will find magic and inspiration, the musings of kink and sexuality, of sensuality and life force (which grasps all creatures crawling the planet) in search of immortality held honestly in a real and recognized moment… This story is about what maybe we share, and maybe we don’t but can understand and empathize with in our genius. Everyperson is me and Everyperson could also very easily be you. This story is meant to Muse.

To Breath and Being,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and consider supporting me, or just click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

Tension and Release

IMG_1504I don’t want to write a blog right now I want to write a love letter or meditate on the importance of weird gut feelings and how vital they are, or I’d like to masturbate until I release all of the electricity in me and shut down like an old televisions’s phosphorescent faded glow…  I want to make out, roll around in the hay, hike through the woods with someone I admire, or fall asleep.  I feel too full to function.  I am tired and just want to shut down and die for a week before reactivating to take over the universe.

I woke up this morning remembering how hard the things I love are, and that collision of understanding and a crazy energy to just blindly make is still in me.

An example:  Puppets.  When I toured the country as a puppeteer for a year I was contracted (for very little pay) to work 40 hours a week in a puppet studio when we weren’t out on tour.  It was grueling physically, mentally and creatively, and when we were on the road very time consuming.  I learned a lot by showing up to the workshop, when we were in town, having to make my own plan for what to tackle every day.  Sometimes it was restoration of old puppets, sometimes learning lines and rehearsing a show we were about to take on tour, it was rebuild and design work, research, booking hotels, cleaning, reorganizing, making sense of a very large and chaotic workshop, going to meetings, practicing moves or learning a new puppet’s limitations and finding ways to make it live, load in and out of the puppet van our gigantic sound and light systems and 9 foot tall set pieces…  And then sometimes it was building something from nothing.  Making puppets of my own.  Learning to design, find the tools, structure, create, jury-rig as alternative to a more complicated process I didn’t have the resources for or as inventive solution and artistic choice.

Meet "General", my first puppet made completely from scratch

Meet “General”, my first puppet made completely from scratch (yes, those are leather chaps)

I would get tired.  I would struggle.  I would worry that everything I laid my hands on was failure and I that I wouldn’t be able to keep it up long enough to make my mark the way I wanted it.  I would crisis in the middle of this, my own vast fortune.

This perfectly describes the tension I live in.

Tension is probably the most perfect way to look at living a fulfilling existence…  Is this my masochistic theory I wonder?

It is stunning at times; when I look back at those days of struggle, yet I look back and wish I was engaged now in similar ways… and then realize I suppose I am.  My struggle today encompasses writing three times a week and publishing, teaching and promoting myself, keeping a steady job, creating work and performing in shows as a soloist, performing and rehearsing with my troupe, learning choreography and lines for the other shows I am cast in, mediating for the communities I do that type of work with, remaining open to new ideas and opportunities as well as staying rooted and connected to the work I’m committed to, maintaining relationships, learning new things, and still tinkering at my work desk making costumes, props, set pieces, and sometimes just work for me and my brain…

I juggle and I balance.  I fail at being perfect at everything (or anything), but I continue to try and measure my progress in terms of increasing capacity, increasing understanding, increasing skill and POV.  I am a growing organism.  I evolve or I die.  I understand new ideas or I wither and become complacent.

Embracing all the different aspects of my sexuality I see myself challenging the easy unfulfilling modes of behavior I’ve repeated historically, including a strong capacity for self repression.  I am learning new ways to approach the life I have with elbow grease towards becoming the life I want.  The tools I am becoming familiar with are transparency, self-confidence, meditation, and clear communication.  I am blessed to feel this tension in me vibrate, shift, and thrive.

To Breath and Being,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and consider supporting me, or just click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

Thank You, May I Have Another

Connection. Help. A tension, a purpose between two people.

Connection. Help. A tension, a purpose between two people. Photo by Justin Moore

I find myself thinking about the ways in which I am thankful for people in all of my communities who help me to be a more whole human being:  my family (of origin and of choice), my GLBTQI, Poly, Kinky, and Sex-Positive playmates, my Drag / Burlesque / Actor / Dancer / Artist / Puppeteer / Maker peers and contemporaries, my friends, my lovers, and my partners (current and past).  I am thankful to everyone who has ever taught me something about themselves and in so allowed me to look at life and at myself in a new light.  I am thankful for the people who were aware and accepting of the little parts of me that emerged as I have discovered myself more deeply over time.  I’m thankful for those who have taken a chance on me in my wandering “youth of new ideas/identities”; those who offered philosophies, suggestions, and new games to play to aid in my development.  I am thankful for the people who respected my newness in any community I found, and who have taken the time (still to this day) to explain how things can work differently than I have believed them to before…  the list goes on, but the root of what I am thankful for is that there are profound depths of acceptance in this world, and I have been able to consistently find them when I have needed to.

What I hope is that I return the favor to those around me.  I hope that by grounding myself in my own new discoveries, that I offer a space of calm and trust other people can use to expand on and explore in their own journeys.

I’ve been writing to my born-again Christian Grandmother lately.  I made it clear to her a little while ago all of who I am – amongst which the descriptors queer, poly, sex-positive, kinky, and a teacher/blogger/performance artist who often graphically explores these themes in my work (I’ll post that letter one of these days).  She asked, in a letter to me recently, who we should be thankful to on Thanksgiving, if not to the God many people no longer believe in.  This was my response:

I am thankful for a great many things, and believe it is important to acknowledge to myself – to FEEL and think about – that thankfulness.  By internalizing these ideas (the things I am thankful for), I am able to hold onto them and incorporate these things as an active and meditative part of my work in this world.  I don’t think I need to be thankful TO anyone necessarily (other than the people I am thankful for themselves).  The practice of being thankful is an important individual and familial ritual to me.  Saying these things out loud is an opportunity to share my thoughts and values with the people I choose to have around me, and to learn about the thoughts and values of those I’ve surrounded myself by.  These things are fundamentally important for me to know about in the people that I love.

I hope we do have hard conversations, and that we stumble and fall over ourselves.  I wish for grace in the getting back up, and that there is always one more try on the horizon to understand and love one another better.  Without tension held perfectly between us, we can not find our way to close perfectly.

To Breath and Being,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and consider supporting me, or just click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

 

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