A Conversation About Relationship, Surrender and BDSM

This morning I am sitting at the south end of the big farmhouse table in our kitchen, having my usual, mate tea. I am without human company. The EQM is in Italy and all our children are at their other homes. What a strange luxury that so many children in this country have two homes. A luxury I imagine many of them would have forgone if it meant they would keep their parents together.

It is a temperate morning, but very windy. Just now, the sun has found its way over the fence, illuminating the opening of the bee hive beyond the cottonwood in our backyard. It’s too cold for these wild striped wonders to hit the air just yet, but there they are piling up, wings vibrating, waiting for their moment. Yesterday Henry (my 18 year old) turned over all the garden beds while I topped the grasses, stalked perennials and aerated roots. It was so warm I was in my bare feet, white winter soles in soft cool earth. Then, the bees were all around us, seemingly hungry, buzzing at our heads, hovering in front of our eyes and, of course, driving the elkhound crazy taunting him into a jaw snapping frenzy after which he’d run for his life into the house, tail uncurled and tucked tightly between his legs.

I don’t like to wear gloves when I work in the garden. It feels too impersonal. Almost like an insult. It is nourishing to be in direct contact with all these plants whose presence means so unspeakably much to me in my life. I was heading a large feisty pampas grass (at least fifteen feet tall with sharp thick fronds at the base) when I felt a piercing sting in my left little finger. I looked down to see my own red blood running in a healthy stream onto the stalks. The pulsing of pain was rich, delicious even. Without thought I smiled and uttered, “thank you”. And this made me think of the conversation I’ve been having with colleagues and friends about the practice of BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Sadism & Masochism), which, not surprisingly, is the fastest growing sector of the Sex Work Industry, by a large margin.

I remember three years ago almost to the day, I was running around in a field with two yearling Friesian fillies. Wild frolicking sisters these two were, 6 months old and full of themselves. I was wondering if I might buy one of them and so, was spending time with them, listening for some sort of direction. There was a marvelous playful thing happening between all of us and I could feel myself slipping into the place of euphoric gratitude that happens when I stop being aware of my upright human-ness and feel, instead, a deep place of my own belonging. Just moments after one of them got a mouthful of fresh water from the trough and deliberately poured it over my head the other one put her soft lips to my upper arm, right on the meat of my tricep, and bit me. Not as hard as she could (she could have taken all my flesh right down to the bone if she’d wanted to). But hard enough that she broke the skin. Not a hit-and-run sort of sneaky bite like ponies are apt to do, this young long-legged draft horse got her teeth in me and stayed there for a moment, long enough to say, “that’s right”. Like she meant it. Like it was an offering. Then she tossed her head back, knickered and so-gently nuzzled my ear, cheek and neck. My tears came so fast, not from pain, for that was euphoric and enlivening, but from gratitude for the intimacy and love of her gesture.

Bear with me here, this moment has so many layers to it, for it was right then, in the split second just after the bite, that I had the premonition that my mother was trying to get in touch with me, trying to tell me she was in trouble. This awareness arrived in me as if I’d been struck by lightening. My bones were shaking and my teeth rattling. What I did not know in that moment is that in less than 24 hours my mother would be found dead in her shower with the water running, but only after I called her neighbors to implore them to go check on her. According to the medical examiner, her death was a “sudden cardiac event” and the townspeople in her community had verified that up to about an hour before her death she was fit as a fiddle, happy, anticipating her matinee attendance at the opera later that afternoon. So here I am, in this field with these wild ones, the sting on my arm deepening both my sense of intimacy with these young fillies and my awareness that this life is precious, fleeting, something is about to happen, and I am not in control, and all I can do is stay right here and say “Yes. I am paying attention.”

Just one week later I would be sitting in the small Congregational church in my mother’s town attending her memorial service, with my hand gratefully caressing the black and blue teeth marks offered me by the filly in the field that day. On that day, I was offered a vision, that perhaps could only have found its way to me through the momentary trance gifted me by the filly’s fierce bite.  Perhaps, had I stayed in my upright human way, frontal lobe ‘making perfect sense’ of everything that was occurring, the message of my mother’s imminent death and the following flooding of love, of rightness of place, would never have found me. I would have been none the wiser, in this visceral way, that there is an unknowable Mystery to this life and our participation in it.

In my experience, so much of our human participation in the modern (primarily Western expression of) BDSM, a culture based on our human dance with surrender and domination, comes from a desire to be overtaken, to be reminded that we are, ultimately, not in control and that the fact of our existence is utterly dependent on forces we do not even comprehend. Here is where this conversation goes to the bone for me. I believe that modern BDSM is a byproduct of, and attempts to ameliorate, the fact that we have evolved ourselves out of intimate relationship with the larger-than-human forces upon whom we depend for our lives and any meaning we find in living them. In my anecdotal research on this topic I have found that cultures and people whose cosmology is based upon a benevolent earth-based god/spirit - who possess a gnosis that we are daughters and sons of this earth - do not have a practice of human to human domination/submission. They do have vibrant rituals that celebrate the dance of human to Mystery submission, surrender and reverence. And while those of my colleagues and friends who are deeply in the BDSM culture, whether professionally or socially, tell me that the practices they employ are sometimes modeled after millennia old ritual like the Sundance ceremony of First Nations People, I see a critical difference between what goes on in the dungeon or bedroom between humans and what goes on in ceremonies under the sky, on the land, between humans and ineffable force we call The Mystery.

I will not go into the details of this particular thread since this is a blog post not a dissertation or book. But it feels important to say that our modern self-imposed disconnection from this earth necessarily causes not only extreme rage, but also grief; both of which must find their way into catharsis. And the monotheism of our economic structures have created utter disempowerment, lack of sovereignty and a catastrophic absence of personal agency. In the intimate terrain of our coupling, our nuclear family, castrated marital structures and the evisceration of righteous masculine and feminine (not to mention the erroneous belief that we are either one or the other, or else) creates, in so many of us, a sense of numbness and a desperation to be overtaken, to be moved beyond ourselves by something we cannot control. ‘Please, someone, just tell me what to do. Make me lose my mind. Remind me how to feel...’ If we are not intimately engaged with the largest force upon whom we are unspeakably reliant and to whom we are utterly vulnerable, how do we explore this dynamic of control and surrender? How do find our resilient edge of resistance and take our place in the necessary process of our lives, allowing our offerings to be inspired by the paradoxical human cocktail of humility, importance and power?

Back in the garden yesterday, I place the blood stained grasses in the pile and head over to the yarrow with its sage green leaves coated in a beautiful silver fuzz. As I reach down to begin trimming I stop, mesmerized, as my bright red blood falls onto the leaves. It is breathtakingly beautiful, my blood on these leaves, its pulse and flow painfully alive in my fingertip, the euphoria the pain causes only growing greater. It lets me know, unequivocally, that I am in relationship with these beings. A thing that offers me more peace and certainty than years of any form of therapy or human to human interaction ever could. Somehow my blood feels like an offering, perhaps the most intimate one I could possibly make to these beings who feel like my family yet, as I stand on my front lawn in this suburban strangeness, a family from whom I feel an impossible-to-breach distance. As my blood dries on the yarrow it looks like nail polish on the tips of its leaves, like fetish adornments. Once again and without surprise my tears well up. As they flow like my blood moments ago I kneel down close to the earth to assure they reach their most precious destination.