Service Class

I will be teaching a workshop on service relationships this February. The class has a listing on Fetlife and the CSPC calendar. I'm surprised and a little intimidated by the response it's getting a full two months out.

I've only been actively writing the curriculum for this class for a month. However, my life has been building the foundation for it over the last 10 years (with a notable acceleration over the last 3 years with Max). In some ways this curriculum feels like completing a thesis project (or how I imagine completing a thesis project feels given that I dropped my traditional grad school program just after starting my thesis project in earnest). What's entertaining to me is that I'm actually using stuff from traditional grad school to complete my kinky grad school project.

Breakfast Cookies for Russell

Russell likes food a lot. Making food is love. Whether he makes it for someone or someone makes it for him, if you want to pay in to the love bank, enjoy food with Russell.

I am not as much about food, but I did have a Christmas tradition with my mom for several years. We would bake up a whole bunch of cookies and then deliver them to our friends on Christmas Eve. Food in general may not be love, but cookies are definitely love. And, bonus!, I know how to bake cookies.

But, bummer, Russell can't really have very much sugar without his body crashing and doing weird things. And so a few months ago I turned to the internet. I needed to find a tasty cookie recipe with plenty of protein and fiber to balance a little bit of sugar. Enter the hearty breakfast cookie recipe that I modified for better Russell enjoyment below.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup almond butter (because then I can serve them to my partner Adrienne)
  
• 1 1/4 cups packed brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup low- or non-fat milk (because it's tastier than water)
  
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 2 cups quick cooking oats
• 1/2 cup wheat germ
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• dash nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 cup dried cranberries (because they're more special than raisins)
  
• 1/2 cup raisins (to keep things sweet)
  
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts (but don't tell Russell)
  

Directions

• In a really large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat together butter, almond butter, brown sugar, and vanilla until creamy. Beat in eggs and milk.
• Mix together flours, oats, wheat germ, salt, cinnamon, and baking soda. Mix into almond butter mixture. Stir in cranberries, raisins, and walnuts.
  
• Drop by heaping tablespoons 2 1/2 inches apart on greased (or non-stick) cookie sheets. Flatten slightly.
• Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 8-10 minutes (maybe a little more). Cool on cookie sheet for 2 minutes, then transfer to cooling racks. Store in an airtight container.

I get about 22 cookies out of a batch, (ymmv). They fit nicely two to a sandwich-sized Ziploc and then they become little take-along baggies of love. I find it helpful to build informed consent before people bite into these cookies. They're super tasty breakfast in a desert-like shape. However, handing someone a "cookie" and having them bite in expecting chocolate numminess tends to result in disappointed/betrayed expressions.

I just finished baking another batch for Russell this afternoon. I was feeling a little off kilter earlier today. Despite the clear and overwhelming evidence, my brain was having a hard time believing it was loved. These things happen. Rather than asking for more external evidence, since that didn't seem to be helping, I decided to create some internal evidence. Clearly, if I'm baking cookies for someone and doing other good things for the people in my life then there must be a lot of love there to be shared around. Whacky logic, but hey it worked. By the time I'd finished eating the sample cookie, I felt all kinds of love. Not so much because more was coming in, but because I was letting more out. Russell's delighted expressions probably helped too.

I started exercising again

While in free-fall, I've had a lot of time to readjust priorities and try different things.

About 2 weeks ago I broke out the old "PT Record" spreadsheet and renamed it "Exercise Menu" (as in, "Today I think I'll have a little from this column and a little from that column and a double helping of those."). I have a partner who is helping me with accountability and I send him a little summary each day. It's been a slow ramp-up, but I'm starting to feel neglected muscle tissue waking up again. I stretch and find different points of resistance. I lift things and feel sore, but strong.

But that's not the only kind of exercise. I've also been growing my heart, mind, and spirit. There have been some major shifts in a couple of my relationships and I've been trusting my spirit to handle them with grace and ease. Letting go without resentment takes a lot of practice, and even if I remember how that doesn't mean it's painless at the time. I'm waking up into a new shape of consciousness. I stretch and find different points of resistance. I make connections and feel sore, but securely connected to my Source. This life of mine is so very blessed.

Poly Go-to Strategies

I recently had a friend of a friend referred to me for advice and support on her new Poly explorations. Below is part of my reply:

Here are my go-to strategies when I hit bumps:
Self Inquiry

• What feels like love to me? What does your partner do that helps you know you're loved? What do you do to show her love? I find the five love languages quiz is a good place to start: http://www.5lovelanguages.com/assessments/love/
• Are my actions, beliefs, and attention encouraging or discouraging expressions of love? Are you holding your own loving actions back for some reason? Do you believe there is room for all of you here? Do you believe that your partner is the only source of love for you? Are you carefully cataloging every time you feel undervalued and possibly missing the little expressions of love in-between?
• NOTE: The questions I almost always find unhelpful to ask directly are What is at the core here? and What needs aren't being met? That's not to say that I don't ask them every time (some lessons are learned more slowly). In my experience though, the answers to those questions point fingers at surface illusions and don't lead to good problem solving. It's like describing the monster under the bed before actually looking to see if there's a monster at all.

Communication

• Start from a place of genuine compassion and gratitude.
• Try to describe the experiences inside your heart without making up stories about what should or shouldn't have happened.
• If you get to the point of making action plans, remember that these are experiments and having things go wrong is sometimes more helpful and informative than having them go right the first time.

Intentional time

• Sometimes, I just miss my partner and the world turns right again after we have a good date.
• This is different from the problem-solving communication time. This is time you write on a calendar and do something you're both likely to enjoy together.
• It can be on a comforting activity that happens on regular schedule. It can also be hidden gems of time when you break out of your routines and find something new together.
• Google calendar is my friend. All the people in my world are very very busy (Seriously, who isn't busy these days?) and sharing calendars helps me find those little spaces to slip in and enjoy one another.

Potential and Kinetic Metaphors

Roller-coaster metaphors have been popping up around me a lot over the last few days. And while they do seem to match this particular part of my life path, I'm really not fond of them. The jostling, the racket of the track which never changes, being surrounded by people having the same ride and screaming their own experience into the air. That's *really* not my cup of tea.

I've been describing this period of impending transition as "Taking a leap with all the materials necessary to build a parachute on the way down." While it's funny and gets most of my point across, it's not exactly the metaphor I'm looking for either. Even though I don't know what's out there and I'm not sure how it's going to happen, I still believe pretty strongly that this leap is about creating and experiencing new heights much more than transforming potential energy into a wild kinetic ride only to land (hopefully softly) on the ground somewhere below.

There is A LOT of faith involved in making my current life choices. It's the kind of faith that invites fear to get the hell out of the way. It's not that I'm fearless or reckless or even particularly courageous. It's that my life is so full of love and blessing that I really don't have much choice but to know that things will work out in their highest and best good.

So, no. This is not a roller-coaster. And these materials aren't for a parachute after all. This is a hang-glider I'm building, and soon I'll be soaring with the eagles. This is stepping off a cliff knowing that my body and support system will be able to sense and ride on the invisible but powerful thermals that are just waiting out there to lift us up.

This is my love-note to all the people in my life who make up my hang-glider. The ones who stand straight and strong against the buffeting gusts. The ones who wrap close and hold tight. The ones who stretch wide and flutter and giggle in the breezes. The ones who bend into the wind and help me get where I think I want to go. Thank you for making the space and time for me to try my wings.

This is also a love-note to Spirit. Who sings in my heart, whispers in my ear, and lifts my feet off the ground.

It is the wind asking me "How good can you stand it?"
And my reply, "Even more than I can imagine tonight!"

Two Years in a week

*flipping the lights on*
*pulling the dust covers off*
*doing an instrument check*
*stretching little-used muscles*

In one week, the hardware in my back will be 2 years old. What have I learned? What has changed? What endures? 2 years is a blink, 2 years is an age.

I'll be back next week.

Dr Jay Williams, my primary surgeon, died on Thursday. The events surrounding his death have left me with a lot to ponder and reflect. I don't think I'll be sharing any of those thoughts here. I am only writing this here to send my love and respect to all those connected to this incident.

Who knew kite strings had such wild lives?

This post contains significant discussion of extreme edge play (something I was helping with, not doing). It's your mouse, skip to the next thing on your reading list now if you don't want to know this about me. (In other words; Mom/Dad you'd rather get the Cliff's Notes version of this.)

Last night, I helped with a suspension scene for Tony. While there was a rope involved, it was not a rope suspension like the pictures you've scene here. During the peak of the scene Tony was hanging by 6 flesh-hooks in his back. I've seen this kind of scene done a few times before, but this is the first time I've been energetically involved with a hook suspension. My role was to be there and support Tony in this experience. This started with ordering the hooks last minute for him, and I don't think it's quite over yet.

I ordered the hooks from KinkyMedical.net less than a week before the scene and they arrived with two days to spare (in the words of Mistress Matisse, "Bruce is the bomb"). By the time I handed the box to Tony I already had a solid start on being his connection to the ground for this high-flying scene.

When I picked him up on our way to the club, he looked like a high-flying ball of nervous energy already. The first kiss in the car gave me a clear picture of my role for the evening. His nervous energy pulled me taught and I in turn cycled it back to the ground to keep him from flying away. I was going to be his kite string. It wasn't my intent to ground Tony. I simply wanted to make sure that the ground didn't forget about him while he was flying and hold just enough tension for him to play on the wind without tumbling out of control. (The good news was I didn't have to be his only kite string. Yay poly!)

As is often the case with big scenes like this, there was A LOT of waiting and prepping and fussing and more waiting. I imagine that a lot of that time I looked like one of the many other friendly voyeurs since I wasn't directly handling equipment or about to be poked myself, but I promise I was extremely energetically involved in this scene at all times. Most of that time I happened it gracefully, but I recall a few moments of snapping a little more fiercely than necessary at someone or something that might have otherwise pulled me off course. If you were one of those innocent bystanders, please know that I intended no more offense than a kite string does a person who tries to hold it without a reel or a pair of gloves.

I have no idea what it's like to be pierced by 8-gauge needles and hang by flesh hooks. I only know what the energy that moved through me felt like. I know what it's like to kiss someone deep enough to feel his energy shift and focus away from the unpredictable future to the present moment. I know what it's like to draw strength up from the earth and pass it to him through my lips and hands. I open up my energy and just provide the channel for this profound experience. As a benefit, I get to feel some of the exhilaration and joy of this amazing expression of life.

I've had enough kite-string like experiences to believe that I'm pretty well wired for this kind of thing, but I'm not supremely skilled or disciplined at it. I can much too easily lose hold of the ground or the path that keeps my energy unique from that of the person who is playing. This time I had several factors working in favor of my success.

First of all was Pupcake. She was my fellow kite string and many times I drew her to me as my own anchor to the ground. This young woman is amazing! She expresses this playful yet frank and grounded energy whenever I'm around her--a true joy and priceless resource last night. I could write a whole other entry solely on how wonderful it was to share this experience with her quite honestly.

Then there was the direct confidence of the man orchestrating the suspension. Whether he's actually done this kind of thing 1000 times over or not didn't matter last night. What mattered to me was that he moved with the presence of someone who had.

His girl was yet another blessing for success. Where Pupcake was my energetic anchoring partner, this girl was the one I trusted to catch the details that slip past someone with the confidence of having done something 1000 times over. She was his much-needed and ever-graceful second pair of hands and eyes. When I needed something logistical to focus on to keep myself grounded, I simply went to her and let her point me in a direction.

And then there was the caring experienced nursing team ready to help his body if anything started to go wrong and the huge circle of supportive friends just outside my awareness each having their own experiences and being aware of this moment with me.


Finally, it was time for the hooks to go in. It is difficult to describe what it is to watch someone you love willingly and willfully process intense amounts of pain while holding space for him to do so. Being present for the yelling and cringing and the edge of tears he will not show. Breathing with him that he might remember to keep breathing. Being aware of the space outside of the circle and deciding which details don't matter and which need attention. Being of aware of the non-energetic space inside of the circle enough to see a request for water or other assistance. Perhaps the best is to say I felt like a painfully resonant instrument in a powerful expression of creativity. (or perhaps I'm just reading too many woo-woo books lately)

When flying a kite, there is the long process of getting to know the feel of the wind that day while you're first getting it into the air. In my experience of being a kite string, I would have to say that this process is harder on the string than any other time. There's jerking and slack and reeling out and back in. Let's just say it's high-stress on a thin piece of conduit. The process of attaching the hooks to the suspension rig and balancing the pulling force on them felt a lot like that to me. I spun around and spilled out a little more than was altogether necessary.

But then...
Tony caught the wind just right. It was beautiful! I was so happy for him and so happy to have all these amazing people around him. We all watched him fly and got to be sprinkled with the joy that sprang from every part of his being. (With really very little blood shed in the process.)

When his body started to react (dizzy, nauseous, sore etc.), I could sense it in my own before he said anything to the top. Sometimes I consciously noticed a change in his breathing or facial expression, but other times it seemed more like the sense was coming from inside of me. This was especially handy as he started to come back down.

I knew when it was time to wrap him up and feed us all cupcakes and when it was safe to move to a more snuggly spot with just Pupcake, Tony and me. Along with the package of sensing his needs I also got to sense his gratitude and joy and ecstasy. I think that's a pretty fair bargain.

Thank you Tony, my love, for sharing this experience with me and all of your friends. You are an amazing gift to this world.

Things to love about my life

I just felt the urge to send a little love text. I typed it out on my not-smart phone. I went to select recipients. The top 5 most recent correspondents are automatically at the top of my list for easy communication on the not-smart phone. Every single one of them merits a late-night love text. AND I still had one more that I needed to search my contacts list for because there are 6 (SIX!!) people in my life that I love in a late-night love-text kind of way.

My life is AWESOME.

Oh and... Bang 4 the Buck is tomorrow night. If you identify as female, get your butt down there! Kaylee and I have an... arresting number prepared.

But this wasn't on the agenda...

Let's talk a little bit more about that job. First off given the nature of the job and the nature of this blog, I'm going to be a little vague about the job so as not to spook the potential employers should they accidentally happen across a description of their job posting here. That's not to say that I'm actively presenting a polished puritan persona either. (My resume lists my volunteer work without shady acronyms.)

What I feel like chatting about though is the slow and steady way the idea of actually moving south and doing this job keeps wheedling its way into my brain. I had a friend/mentor remind me that the choice to take the job is not in fact a lifetime commitment. She took a job up in the Alaskan bush once holding to the philosophy that she could do anything for a single school year. This little bit of wisdom was precisely the growing condition my seed of a wish needed to grow into a full-blown desire.

That desire requires a lot of creative thinking though. This is where the scene from Princess Bride where Inigo rattles off a litany of obstacles to the recently mostly-dead Wesley pops vividly to mind. Rather than storming a castle though I'm looking at returning to an abandoned passion and moving 800 miles away from my family. The Inigo in my head sounds a little like this "I'll say. First, how do we get the job. Then once we get the job, how do we plan the exit strategy for the current job, and how do we afford to live in the new city, and how do we prepare to enjoy life without seeing family every night of the week, and how do we find the right place to live, and how do we decide how much to take with, and how do we avoid/productively deal with the challenges that made us abandon the passion in the first place, and how do we reassure family that everything will be just right and..." Eventually Fessig breaks in reminding us that we haven't even heard back about the cover letter yet.

Sigh...

What's This? A Post?!

When one goes for more than a month without posting, things (a.k.a. huge fucking deals at the time) get boiled down to bullet points. In no particular order (not even chronological) here's my list:

• I'm exploring a whole different kind of loving with an amazing super-wonderful couple full of joy and wisdom. It isn't exactly NRE for me, but the kind of peace and pleasure I feel when we make time for one another is no less delicious.
• I just (as in moments ago) sent in an application to a job 800 miles away from where I'm living now. I'm especially enamored of the idea of this job. I've decided to put off the realities of moving until it's actually time to worry about it.
• I've now done two different dance performances at LRS. It's a lot of fun and if you are female and want an encore of my most recent performance with Kaylee, you should come to Bang 4 the Buck.
• About 6 years ago I started attending a local New Thought type church. I've been attending ever since with varying degrees of commitment and regularity. This whole time I've been avoiding "drinking the kool-aid" and taking their foundations class. I just went to the first session of that class tonight. There's a lot more to this and it will likely be a source for longer blog entries in the near future. Prepare for the "Woo-woo"
• I had some bumpy spots in some of my poly relationships over the course of the last two months. They pretty much all boiled down to: communication, logistics, and invalid comparisons. Again, there may be more details later.