April 4, 2011 – Purveyor of Pleasure

Both Onyx and I saw this call on Lee Harrington’s site and immediately we both wanted to write something. We’re going to submit a piece together and we’re going to make the time in the seriously crazy month ahead to do it. We have temple this weekend (Thursday-Sunday), then are taking an alchemy class the next two weekends (Saturday-Sunday), and have a Beltane gathering the weekend after that, when the essay is due. We’ll make it work, or get burned out trying.

In any case, I wanted to share the call along, since I had not seen it before Lee published it, even though it has been out there calling for submissions for a few months already. Here you go.

http://fetlife.com/users/117165/posts/508213

Call for Submissions:

Sacred Power, Holy Surrender: An Anthology of Spiritual Power Dynamic

I’m looking for people who are actively in power dynamic relationships (dominant/submissive, master/servant, master/slave, owner/property) and consider those relationships to have a strongly spiritual aspect – or perhaps even to be the mainstay of their spiritual path – to write essays about your experiences of spiritual power dynamic relationships. I’m looking for essays from both M-types and s-types, or from couples if you’d like to write something together. You can write under any name of pseudonym. If you feel comfortable with it, I would love to have essays accompanied by a photo of the two (or more) of you.

Any religious or spiritual perspective is acceptable so long as that perspective is not blatantly intolerant of others, and there is no generalization about what the behavior of others ought to be. Keep it to one’s own experiences, please. Write about what moves you on this path, and what you would have wanted to see written down about spiritual power dynamics when you were first starting out. If you really want to write for this book but you’re having trouble organizing your thoughts on the matter, ask me to send you a questionnaire about the subject, which you can fill out with in-depth specific answers and I’ll edit it together into a proper essay.

Essays should be 2000 – 8000 words, emailed to me at cauldronfarm@hotmail.com as a Word or Word Perfect attachment. Deadline is May 1, 2011. Each contributor will receive a .pdf copy of the book.

Please pass this CFS around to anyone you think would be interested!

Thank you,
-Raven Kaldera

I’m having trouble with gender dissonance ((traditionally the word for an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously, though now often used in place of dysphoria in reference to gender issues)) again and am working on getting to a place of doublethink ((simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs)) around my gender. I just wrote about this, in case you missed it. Because of this I’ve been thinking a lot about my gender journey, my process to get where I am today, and I’ve been wondering about what will come in the future.

Most of these images are up somewhere on this site already, though a couple of them are new. Click for a larger version.

After compiling these, though sure there are plenty others, I am struck with just how long my genderqueerness has been with me. The first image is from somewhere around 2002, the next three from 2005 & 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, and, finally, 2011. The very last one is from today. Even when I was presenting mostly femme I was gender bending a bit, usually at least a few times a year doing drag if nothing else, but often as a side part of me that I just pushed aside for a while, thinking I could just be femme.

I’ve come to a lot of realizations recently over why I did that, ones I’ve shared with Onyx and which I think make sense in a way. I’m becoming so much happier now that I’m integrating all of me, though I’m discovering even more identities, even more parts of me that are all me yet slightly different combining sex, gender, sexuality, and power in different ways to create a sub-category of me. I’m a service submissive boy, a demanding genderqueer Top, a bratty masochistic femme kid, a loving Daddy, a glitterfag, an innocent and excitable little kid, and more.

While a lot of the images above may seem similar, and they are, undoubtedly, are me, they each show a different gender expression in my eyes. A lot of them look similar, but I can see the first time I felt sexy and confident as a femme, the first time I really embraced my genderqueerness, the fun of dressing in drag in so many different ways. They are all similar, but all different.

Now, with my short peacock hair, flat chest, round hips, and eye makeup I’m becoming more comfortable with the self that changes into the red lipstick, twirly skirt, and low-cut top wearing femme that changes into the steampunky gent that changes into the bratty femme girl and so on and so forth. How I present varies, but my identities are all inside me all the time, choosing who gets to come out to play.

Pleasure is my business, my life, my joy, my purpose.

Day: April 4, 2011

Call For Submissions: Sacred Power, Holy Surrender

Gender Journey