What was it that I really loved about being in contact with the “kink community”? Mainly I’m thinking about being on FetLife if I remember rightly, though there are many conversations with people beyond that. I never liked the specifically LGBT websites. The “culture” always got to those, the politics, the conformity in the name of difference, the brittleness.

But the general ones, they had something. It didn’t matter if someone was heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual etc. It was an individual, candid act of being, to share. I loved that possibility of unguarded communication.

A liaison did come of my participation on one site, one that I’m very grateful for, for while it lasted. And the sharing I was able to do online, and have appreciated by some, was an expression of what I was, and what I was discovering of myself as a sexual being. These things had a sacredness to them. They weren’t about ego, or “getting off”, and of course they were all freely given and received.

I withdrew from FetLife just a short while before coming together with my partner, who is not interested in BDSM at all as it happens. Premonition I expect. It was appropriate. I made my Magick Pig blog private (I’m not sure if it will be relaunched, or in what form). It had been devoted to sexuality and spirituality, and especially my own journey.

Being with someone changes you, and having a good sex life alters the way you relate to desire and sexual imagination. I am in a healthier place now, not because I am not actively involved in BDSM, but because I am so much happier, and not just sexually.

What I discovered during that time is still me, still what I am, but it was always about something of depth. Being in community with others sexually in that way was joyful in an area which for all too many people is shadowy, but need not be. It was also responsible, respectful and kind. It was not and is not about “just sex” (there is no such thing as “just sex”), unintelligent desire, “getting off” or hooking up. It was about sexual being, individually embraced and honestly shared. It was not about collective identity in the way that conventional “sexual politics” so often is, but an area where grown men and women could with candour reveal and offer freely and plainly, the company of who they instinctively were. It’s difficult to express how subtle a thing that is, how tender and at peace.

What was it I brought with me from that place?

Well it wasn’t just a place, or a time. It was a process and a journey I was going through in myself, one which became very conscious and manifest at that point. It was the realising of what you could call my sexual soul. Something in many ways best understood through poetry and art, magick, drama , ritual, all the creative arts. It is so animal, so human, touched by the divine (and there’s the hazard), and absolutely bestial. As if between the worlds of dream and naked flesh, we are one thing, a thing utterly you. In some way it is the what of your individual self, with it’s great deep root, in a world so obsessed with who.

I think it’s very valuable to have a sense of what you are, as an individual. Identity is the new currency of controlled consumption. “In a world where you could be anything … “. But you’re not anything, and you’re not going to be anything, you’re you. It’s in your flesh, it’s in your desire, your inner yearnings. It’s your value, and though it can be owned with your consent, it can’t be bought.

We are subject to the world, mortal, bound in so many ways. Just like mud, fruit, cattle. Things of fertility and value. I can’t tell you how other people relate to these things (without presumption), but I know what they mean to me, and that between the fire of sexuality and the clay of flesh is found a tablet written by the hand of Nature.

Die Welt