Take it from me

Sixteen months ago when my Master first told me to blog, his instruction was that I should begin by writing about love. I was afraid then, and while I still am in some way, it is tempered by other things: most strongly the compulsion to please him. Some say that all emotions are made up of measures of fear and love.... that I'm not sure of, but I know that my feelings for Master can be summed up in that way. Fear, love, fear, love... fear of love... love of fear.... my most basic and most passionate self has its time through him.

I have learned to love him with a great deal more abandon since then - but by that I don't mean any degree of romanticism. It still amazes me that some people can remain, persistently, drawn to love as a cure.... as a resolution.... as a faith...
Love does not overcome. It does not give any more than it takes. Love is not an ideal of joy - it is an ideal of power.

The love I feel comes with a sense of sorrow, of liberation, and of death. It is utterly disempowering, an emotional sacrifice. It is no less consuming than it was sixteen months ago - what has fallen away is doubt.

Because it is beautiful in its pain. Owing to it. Those who only see beauty in the benign aesthetic are losing out - only half living. Incredible bliss lies in our most agonising emotions - because they contain so much life. Living - really living - is not about the accumulation of happiness and avoidance of suffering..... it is immersing oneself in both.

I am emotionally masochistic. I can take measures of sadness, and hurt, and guilt, and shame, in the same way that I do the strokes of a hand, a whip, or a knife - the goal being to surpass my resistance, embrace the feelings, and accept the bliss that is pain.

The shame when my Master is disappointed. The bitterness of his care for others. The hurt of believing that he does not love me. The horror of inevitable loss. These things are the grief that is love.