Solar Spring + New Moon: A love strange, dark, and magnificent

It's Friday. Hello.

This month is ending on a terrible, almost paralyzingly fearsome note. I don't need to recount what is happening on Turtle Island — the events within artificial US borders and the effects that will spill over to the north and south — or the broader implications for global suffering. If you know, you know. If you have been doing what I had done steadily for a few years and not followed the news much because it became more overwhelming than productive, then I cannot fault you because I don't want to slip back into old doomscrolling habits either, and I'm struggling to find healthy ways of learning what I now very much need to learn; but what you don't know, you may well find out anyway. And as I have expressed anger and despair about in usually less public posts, I must somehow cope with the heightened authoritarian threats while simultaneously managing the heartbreak of a second IVF cycle turning fruitless and the severe anxiety of entering unemployment under these economic circumstances. As of three hours ago, I am jobless.

I do not know how I am in any way functional. Life is going on, and I've even taken some key steps to intentionally retaining fragments of hope and self-agency; but either I'm numb or I haven't even fully comprehended the amount of misery I'm about to experience. I can't fathom how someone who isn't a citizen here, or someone whose vulnerability to anti-trans or anti-queer initiatives is greater than my own, would be faring. Now as it happens, I rewatched Everything Everywhere All At Once the other night, and it helped me insofar as it reminded me that even if I live in a moment that is simply the culmination of life's worst possible outcomes — which might not be true, because some of the worst things that could have happened to me in the past did not and now cannot — I should not squander the opportunity in front of me to do the things that I need to be doing right now. In other words, it is incredibly important for me to exist at this present time, even if I do not yet understand why. However, even with such an assurance, I would very much like to know that why, and it would be the greatest understatement I've ever made to say that I would appreciate if at some point soon the worst possible outcomes were traded for a few vaguely better ones.

Such an emotionally precarious state is psychologically dangerous in turn. The longer it's sustained, especially if any stress increases, the more that trauma will set in. I think it's already set in for most of us, to be frank, so the question is how long we will need to recover and how much of that time we will ever be given. I hope I don't give in to possibilities like psychosis, self-harm, or harming others. As I continue trying to have a child and looking for a new day job — stars fucking help me, may it be a job I will thrive in instead of rapidly burning out — I am also increasing my efforts at personal and community preparedness, whether the ultimate scenario is that my family and I will have to leave this country or that we have to lay low here. It is incalculably necessary right now to be strengthening our ties instead of severing them.

And in holding on to others, I am falling more in love with my owner than ever before. This post is not about our relationship in concrete detail, but it's heavily informed by it. It is a meditation on how I understand love in the context of kink, and how that sort of love is the connective, regenerative fire burning within and between all things. With the holiday on the Wheel of the Year that arrives tomorrow, I offer these words both as radical resistance and as seasonal reverence.

The night of growth rekindled

I haven't celebrated Valentine's Day in a very long time. Of course the holiday is "real," by which I mean not just a "greeting card company" holiday as some people consider it today; it genuinely started as a saint's feast day that became associated with courtly love in the medieval period. The specifics of that history I won't go into here, but don't let anyone tell you Hallmark or the like invented the whole thing. Nevertheless, I'm not keen on Valentine's Day because the commercial aspects are suffocatingly heteronormative and because the day used to be the anniversary for my abusive relationship long ago. And sometimes it feels tempting to look past those things and celebrate it anyway — but besides how my owner doesn't like the day either, there's also the fact that with Gŵyl Fair (Imbolc to more people) happening just beforehand, I usually feel like that's the only February holiday I need for celebrating what's often termed romantic love.

I am not sure how many practitioners who observe the Wheel have this association for February 1st, but it's arisen for me over time. The birds aren't choosing their mates yet, as the old medieval St. Valentine's association went; the birds where I live are still in their winter cycle, not quite ready to breed or migrate north for breeding. But in my rites' cosmology there is now a focus on the mammals who have begun to lactate and give birth, and on the preparations that must be made for planting seeds. We are entering one season where fertility deserves special attention. Yet simultaneously, this is still the dark half of the year, the light only just returning; in the darkness dwells the ecstatic, and in terms of available food we are running out of our winter stores. What lies ahead is a last ordeal, the completion of the alchemical regeneration that began at the autumn equinox. And having exited the nadir of the solstice, there is finally a chance for grace, peace, acceptance of the darkness. There may even be grief in seeing the darkness, our teacher, start to fade away.

I see a tender and precious love in this, because connection and relation turn separate and even opposing interests into more than the sum of their parts. Love is that sum and also that more. We should never feel obliged to love our human abusers, but that is a different state of affairs. To love someone requires some reconciliation of legitimate boundaries and needs, of consensually merging selves together even when it feels very challenging. On this upcoming night, I increasingly choose to honor that push and pull, that challenge, that ultimate growth. Other holidays may lead me to focus more on matters more blatantly sexual, but here is a less corporeal eroticism. One might debate whether it's medieval courtly love, but it is at least a sublime surrender.

On romance

Just as I don't tend to observe Valentine's Day, apparently I also seem to go my own way in how I think of romance, at least when contrasted with the semantics of romance that I tend to encounter in discourse around modern Western[1] queer sexuality. There, for at least a couple of decades I have found a prevalent triad of "attractions" described: sexual, romantic, and platonic. What sorts of feelings belong in each category, and how to describe those feelings, is a subject of extensive debate, which I don't feel compelled to weigh in on when it's framed as those three things, because the arrangement doesn't read correctly to me.

I'm not the first to comment that platonic is a strange choice of word when the love described by Plato is not "just friendship" and takes seven different forms; but accepting that mutated meaning for what it is, and also acknowledging the more newly coined descriptor of queerplatonic, I personally think that interpersonal attraction cannot be split into types. We may feel attracted to and attached to others for varied reasons and in varying degrees, but the substance of that feeling is essentially always the same. Sexual orientation is worth distinguishing insofar as the people we're attracted to will not always be people who activate our sexual desire, yet I see any such desire as an overlay on the existing attraction.[2] And just as there can be a sexual overlay, there can also be what I might call a "romantic overlay," but this requires some unpacking.

I often have the impression that people describe relationships as romantic when those relationships are very intimate, very attached, very intertwined, or when various culturally-determined gestures that are tautologically also described as "romantic" get performed. This feels very arbitrary to me. Simply being emotionally close is not any different from baseline attraction that has deepened; where is the line drawn? And those gestures are not themselves sufficient, because they could be anything.

What makes more sense to me is to use romantic as a convenient shorthand for something that isn't just intensely strong but mutually so — thus inherently excluding one-sided obsessions — and also is maintained with extreme deliberation, with both parties regarding their dyadic[3] connection as something to value for its own sake, not just what each member "gets out of it." I may be entirely wrong about whether this is what others are trying to describe when they mean romantic love these days, and I am aware that this has no bearing on the older concept of romantic love as something that contrasts with, say, the love potentially arising out of an arranged marriage; but in any time period, to me that elevated dyadic link is what the poets have sanctified. A halfway mystical thing. No, not even halfway. A love dedicated to remaining in continuous good relation really does have the power of the divine.

In such a framework, I think we can still talk about how often we experience romantic love, or how much gender affects our ability to experience it; but it also isn't something that can be reduced down to the level of purely individual experience the way that raw attraction or sexual desire can. People who fancy themselves to have had a lot of romantic relationships have maybe been fooling themselves, and many people who tend to imagine they aren't very romantically inclined (including myself before I started really thinking about this[4]) might have much more of that capacity in them than they acknowledge, only lacking the cultural tokens associated with it.

Dyadic dynamics in kink

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, I believe that kink is the most natural type of space for fully exploring romance as I've now defined it. Often we may associate the romantic with the vanilla, but that's only when speaking of those stereotyped tokens and gestures: the candlelit dinners, the rose petals on the bed. If a dyad is to be maintained and nurtured by the people within it, this requires direct dialogue, direct negotiation, and healthy kink culture operates off of that already, particularly with regard to D/s or any other activity that relies on a generative grammar of roles and rules to intentionally circumscribe "a dynamic."

Nonmonogamous/polyamorous culture, in that limited ways I've experienced it[5], has many of the same advantages: discussing different nonmonogamy styles and establishing different fidelity agreements can demand people think in a very granular way about how they spend their time and interact with each of their partners. Kinky and/or nonmonogamous lifestyles contrast with (heteronormative) vanilla monogamy's guessing games where it appears that regarding any given relationship, partners are expected to talk with everyone else in their lives and get advice from everyone else in their lives except from each other. But while I have my biases, I think that kink offers the highest degree of intentional dyadic development, with infinite permutations available for not just the form and structure of relationships but also for the ways that romantic love can even be expressed.

In kink, there is acknowledgment that sometimes the ways we want to relate to one another are strange. Even violent and frightening. It is up to us, together, to create what feels right for us, what can be equitably sustained, and as needed how to cause hurt without causing harm. I am my owner's pet, and he is his pet's owner. This was mutually chosen and it is mutually developed; and the specificity oddly gives us more freedom than if we limited ourselves to broad headings like being merely husband and wife. Anything is possible if it makes sense for growing ourselves as a dyad — for remaining truly in good relation together.

None of this is to say that kink automatically proceeds in a vibrantly romantic direction. The risks of many kink activities can easily create bad relation instead, and it's fairly common to engage in kink together on a one-time basis or at least without becoming invested in a dynamic right away — just as some people practice kink in tandem with sex, while some people leave the sex out of it.

And naturally, both within kink and beyond it there are people who do not require romance, faring well enough through their lives with whatever they find instead. Given how I'm framing the matter now in my mind, I would doubt there's anyone who wouldn't benefit from romance at all; but still, better not to force such things when they aren't ready to occur organically.

I know, in any case, what I long needed, and then found, and has sustained me, made me more than me.

To my love in this darkness

O my love, comfort arrives from you like the rumble of thunder as much as like the softness of snow.

I wear the gift of your care for me around my neck each day, always a moment when leather caresses flesh.

I will care for you as well, not in the same ways but in the ways I am suited for.

I will sing for you as you make me sing, though I am free to also sing without your goading.

The winter winds still howl, but now they are our home.

Your kiss is a bite, and I beg for it, O my love, the crown of my being.

I am a rabbit in your lap, and a deer fleeing from the hunter but surrendering sweetly in the end.

The fire between us burns all hours, in all things, all places, a god of the gaps, a need-fire, a hearth, the together-place.

And this cannot be taken from us. Our love is strange, dark, and magnificent in ways the tyrants will never be blessed to know.

[1] It's worth emphasizing modern because of how there has not been just one language of queerness across all times and cultures. Western is meanwhile a very imperfect term that I prefer to break down into constituent parts, but here it applies rather well as a hegemonic catch-all.

[2] And sometimes sexual taboos play a role insofar as there are people we feel attracted/attached to but whom we learn both through evolution and upbringing that we should absolutely never sexualize ourselves. Of course, not everyone learns as much — but if they don't, what results is not an orientation in its own right.

[3] Composed of two entities, while acknowledging the fact that these romantic relationships don't have to be exclusive and can also incorporate more than two people. But even a romantic relationship in triad, tetrad, or larger formats still constitutes the built up effect of overlapping dyads.

[4] I also used to and still do question the moral judgments that seem to inform dividing the sexual from the romantic as inherently separate categories. It feels awfully close to the sexual being "dirty" and the romantic being "clean."

[5] Being nonmonogamous and formally in an open marriage, but also moving very methodically toward whatever new opportunities present themselves rather than seek something new on purpose. This is all early enough that I remain somewhat like a blushing virgin about it.

Thank you for reading, and may tomorrow's holiday be wild and beautiful.

Because of now being unemployed, it is possible that I will increase activity for this newsletter to fill spare time and hopefully encourage more monetary support. However, please be advised that whenever I do find a consistent income again — which realistically won't be here — new work responsibilities may impact either my posting schedule or frequency. And now more than ever, if my writing isn't being paid for here, I may need to relax my focus here to write more things I can submit for paid publication.

Until that point, I remain committed to Friday missives. Next week there should be a return to tree lore, and after that — because it will indeed be Valentine's Day — I will have more extensive thoughts on the trope of birds choosing mates.